Some recent work

[chris_x422]

Hi all,

Not been around these parts for a while.
I do miss this place!

Been busy in limbo for a long time, our parent company went into administration, and kept us there for ages while trying to find a buyer.
After much waiting, we were made redundant at the last minute.
But we have now been picked up by another company, and are just starting to get back in our stride.

Anyway, I thought I'd post a few stills from some recent tests and stuff. I have an interesting animation too, but can't post that until it's aired.

Chris

[domdib]

Sorry to hear about your employment woes  . I hope the new company works out.

Images are great. The displacements on the rocks in the second one are intriguing - care to share how this was done? And I love the glacier in the third one.

[Henry Blewer]

Really nice images. I like the rocks (2nd image) and the moon and planet best. Welcome back.

[Tangled-Universe]

Nice work here. Especially the first two works are very interesting. Great work on those rocks. I wonder how you made these strong crevices, especially on the left rockstructure. I guess these are image-based displacements/texturing?

Cheers,
Martin

[chris_x422]

Thanks guys,

it has been like living on a roller coaster the last few months.
Hoping to get down to some serious work again now.

The rocks in the second image, this was a test I ran yesterday on sculpting base meshes in zbrush and pushing them further with procedural displacement and textures in terragen.
I'm hoping to run a few more tests in this vein.

The glacier shot is part of a time lapse animation showing the growth and retreat over thousands of years.

The ocean shot is a test for an animation I'm about to start.

Moon was for a pitch.

Cheers

Chris

[otakar]

Would love to see that glacier animation. Great render!

[Kadri]

I hope all gets better! Your work is very nice
I like the ocean and the planet images the most!
I have a planned image with a glacier but not a wide shot like yours.
With a little better defined texture (especially nearer the beach) it would look much better.
But maybe this is the look you are after. Because i know you can do it if you want it

[inkydigit]

good to see you back Chris, redundancy sucks, it has happened to me before...
some great work here..look forward to gthe anim...

[chris_x422]

Thanks again.

I keep telling myself that I should be more active here, but life usually finds a way of getting in the way.
It was no surprise to me that terragen did so well in this survey last year.
http://cgenie.com/articles/1158-cgenies-big-cg-survey-is-now-open-have-your-say.html
Great software, support and user base!
Everyone's welcomed here, no matter the level, a refreshing lack of cg snobbery.

I'll get the animation posted as soon as it's aired.

Cheers

Chris

[Seth]

very good job on the renders !
good atmo on the ocean scene and very good displacement for the strange looking rocks !
can you give a hint of the process to achieve this kind of rocks ? ^^
i like the overall aspect of the space render too.

definitely a good serie

[chris_x422]

Cheers Seth.

I'm thinking about putting together a tutorial for the rock workflow used in the image.

I very often have strict concepts and art direction to adhere to, and generating pure procedural or data driven terrains won't do.
So I've been working more with sculpting packages like zbrush and mudbox to create very specific types of structure and augment them in terragen.
So I'm using that in combination with maya for scene layout, and camera / object animation.

Chris

[Seth]

oh ok !
that would be great to read your tuto when it will be done
we don't see a lot of imported rock's structures, and remembering a cliff i saw once created with ZBrush, I guess we could do great stuff with rendering this kind of models through TG2 ^^

[ra]

Very impressive work! All the best for you!

[Kevin F]

love the one with the large rocks. I'd place them on the coast with some nice frothy waves pounding them.

[Dune]

I'm thinking about putting together a tutorial for the rock workflow used in the image.

That would be interesting, I'm keen to know. I haven't tried myself, but would it be possible to populate imported objects such as your rocks with trees/grass?