I’ve just returned from helping out Alex Murray at ripe give a talk about digital design at an apple conference in Oslo. It was an interesting event, mainly targeted towards the press and media, but there was also a talk from AKQU, which was interesting and a talk from Microsoft about the future of ‘search’ on the web.

I must say, I did find the search talk to be very interesting. Search is touted to be the next bug thing as far as user interaction is concerned as a search has very targeted outcomes for the user, and is the most direct form of understanding the users needs. The concept of pages being built on the fly (using shadow pages to rank in google) is becoming more widespread, especially in the media and newspaper sectors. The whole idea of having the option to be directed to a targeted page, based on you as a user and specifically tour search data is very exciting. AKQU were also showing some interesting work at the conference, the work they did for Fiat ‘eco-drive’ and work they did recently with nike. It must nice to work with big budget clients !

I have finally managed to put together my first book using Blurb Books, and I have to say i’m very impressed. The software to put your book together is really nice and when the actual book arrived I was very happy with it.

If you are thinking of creating a book, do check them out, it’s well worth a look.

Last week I attended a 3 day apple Final Cut advanced video editing course. It was excellent as, but a bit daunting as I hadn’t done the initial course, so it was all a bit ‘jump straight in’ as the course was really for professional video editors. As I already use Final Cut I wasn’t totally as sea and quickly found my feet after day one when the course moved into compositing and effects.

I decided that i’d sit the exam at then end of day 3, and I passed ! So i’m now an apple certified Final Cut editor, so if Yorkshire Telly was still going strong, I could possibly have a small change in career !

Just finished working on branding the Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi. This is the hotel that is located on Yas Island and is the last race in the 2009 Formula 1 calendar. The whole branding campaign has being a huge success and is being rolled out to the public now.

Another piece of work produced at ripe for Media City in Manchester. After winning a recent pitch to work on the Media City account, ripe are now producing a number of pieces of design work for the scheme. This image was produced for use in a brochure and shows a number of schemes produced by the Peel group. I thought it would be nice to show how this image developed and i’ve uploaded a few additional image to show how it ended up looking as it does here in the final 3d render.

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If you are in any way interested in 3d design, be it for something as simple as a 3d logo, right through to working on the next Pixar 3d rendered blockbuster, you simply must read 3D World.

This is a great learning resource for anyone interested in 3d design. I’ve being reading it since I believe it was originally released and it’s obviously got a really good team working on it as it’s always very relevant to todays market and available technology. For example this months magazine has a decent article on lighting an external CGI of a building using Vray and it’s relativley new sun & sky system along with the newish physical camera. This is all really ‘current’ stuff and is a big help to anyone trying to learn all this crazy stuff on their own !

There’s also a good article about modeling a character’s face using Mudbox and Max with Mentlal Ray, which is again a very tricky workflow if your trying this kind of thing for the first time.

All in all i’d recommend this magazine above all others if 3d work, animation and visualisation is something you aspire to. Get it bought !

After drooling over the i-phone when it was launched, who didn’t ?, I was one of the many people who simply couldn’t justify the cost, I like contracts at a fraction of the i-phone tarifs.

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Well, after finally updating my website and doing a touch of SEO (search engine optimization) i’ve had the phone (or mouse) ringing off the hook.

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This is a fun project that i’m working on for a friend, designer Mark McGrath. He designed the 2d ‘Hug’ logo and character and asked if I could do a 3d version for him. This image is my 1st render and is a work in progress. I used poly modeling to create the 3d character and then skinned and boned the character manually so I could put them into various poses. I realized that I wanted to have more control over the animation rig in the character and decided to re-rig him using Brad Noble’s excellent skeleton rig. I’m also reworking the hands, arms, feet and hair and hopefully I should have an animated version of the character finished soon.

I thought it would be nice to give a bit of background and ultimately show a few examples of my journey into the wonderful world of 3d design and visualization.

I started my journey back at college when I saw an early version of Stratavision, it looked amazing, but as with all things in those days, although the Poly had a copy, you weren’t really allowed to use it ! Then as my degree course was coming to an end, a new animation department opened and a handfull of SGI machines appeared. Again we were not allowed too close to these, but I saw the potential of what could be achieved and it led me to persue a Mac 3d package that I could run on my Mac (an LCIII, wicked at the time).

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