Sketchbook, Inc.

In 2008 I was approached by Coke to model and render out some Emeco Navy Chairs in several colors. It’s nice to see that this project became a reality! As you can see here Coke partnered with Emeco to develop a line of chairs that is made from recycled Coke bottles. Here are some photos from the launch: And below if one of my rough original renderings. I need to dig up the finals. Will post soon.

Had a moment to play around in Zbrush for an hour yesterday. Started from a sphere and made this demon head. I don’t know why I tend to make evil looking faces. Probably because I love scouring zbrush forums where all the character designers and modelers hangout. I don’t think there is a market for fluffy cute things. It’s monsters and demons that are all the rage

It’s bothers me that I can sculpt pretty well but can’t draw worth a crap.

Here are a few test  stills from an animation done for Euro RSCG for a Barclays iShares microsite. I think it’s been about a year since working on this project. That’s how behind I am on posting work! The site was comprised of 3 sections, each with a different 3d animation at it’s core.

The first section was a stack of cards, the second a bucket with water, and the third a dartboard & darts. Cards animated with c4d’s mograph module. Realflow and Vray also used heavily.

Here’s a fun little image that was modeled in Zbrush with Z-Spheres, and then painted with Bodypaint. it was intentionally modeled very low poly, with the hopes of smoothing in Unity 3d for an Iphone game. This was going to be something akin to a music machine. All animated with each part moving and producing music. In the end Unity could not smooth the mesh (doh!), nor can it use much of the rigging that I had built to animate this. So I now would like to go in and sculpt the crap out of this little sucker. Maybe convert it into something totally different…

One of my goals last year was to learn Zbrush. It’s one of the few goals I accomplished! Unfortunately my projects don’t often need Zbrush. So I sneak it in when I am able. Still am fairly beginner at it. I’ve been pushing my clients to adopt Zbrush and displacement as a standard for a lot of 3d product creation, but it’s a slow sell. Only a matter of time. Here are a few images created recently of some Nike on body product. Note the insanely low poly base mesh which renders with displacement at render time like butter! Vray and Zbrush make a great team!

We recently modeled a high rez Nike Shox shoe for a Nike spot that was created by Ryan Rothermel (Decoy) and Spilled Karma. Linus Jodwalis textured and animated the shoe in Maya. Great work to all!

Nike Mobius Portal from sketchbookinc on Vimeo.

Here’s a rendering of some nike packaging just finished for Big Giant. These boxes are crazy high rez. Built them from scratch with thickness, etc. Renders done in Vray.

This project is still being tweaked – but here are some small renders of the progress.

Update:

Busy Busy Busy!

Several new projects.

A couple retail renderings for Big Giant. Almost done with the 2008 chicago marathon space that they built out last year. They didn’t come away with good photos, so I will be rendering the space in 3d. Also need to work on a smaller rendering for BG. This is the second largest retail space I believe I have ever worked on, aside from the Nike Factory store. The amount of product in this scene is pushing my computers to their limits. Vray Proxy objects being used at will!

My goal is to use a lot of this product (which was ported over from c4d renderer), and I will be going back and re-rendering a lot of my old work in Vray.

Also working on a 3d illustration for BSSP in SF. 

On the back burner are a few Nike projects as well, that I probably won’t get to till the end of the month. 

Lastly some wine bottles for Dot Zero.

Will post some images as soon as I have them done.

Here are some renderings I finished up before the holidays for Big Giant. Jason Bacon provided me with a base model built in SketchUp for the room layout, as well as as most of the props in the scenes. As you can see the quality of the props are very very low as they were created for use in Sketch Up. This includes the pink people. I’d like to re-render these with high res, textured objects at some point. We just ran out of time and it wasn’t really that important to get the point across.

The structure around the installation I created on my own, and although the bricks ended up being much too large in scale, overall the feeling of the warehouse worked well for the project. Rendering done in Vray.

I worked on this project for Mitch Morse over at The Code Project. He was working with Microsoft on some branding and asked for me to render out some elements for a presentation. We rendered these in Vray. Mitch provided skins for the shoes and the Zune concept, as well as some Zune branding elements to design out the van. We also rendered several packaging concepts not shown here. Scott Wilson, an accomplished industrial designer designed and modeled the Zune (not shown).

I worked on the first round of this project with Ziba. After that Nike took this project inhouse. I worked on this round briefly. As I recall I was filling in for someone.

Round 3 as far as I know went to Eight Inc. In San Francisco.

This most recent round Nike hired Skylab Architecture (Jeff Kovel).

Below are some renderings for this latest round. These were rendered with c4d’s Advanced Render. We also created a 3 minute flythrough of the space in Max using Vray. See the Animation

We had to rebuild the entire store in 3ds max due to c4d’s animation limitations at the time.

Nike worked with me to visualize the new concept for the Nike Sportswear Store.

This was my first retail project rendered in Vray for c4d, which has a lot of limitations and bugs, but does a much nicer job than c4d. Nike provided the store architecture and fixturing on this project. I textured and lit everything, and then worked on merchandising. Nike provided some rough direction, and I filled in the holes.

I am working for the weekend on some speaker renderings for Aperion Audio. I’ve been working with AA for over a year now rendering out speakers as they are developed.

AA used to photograph their speakers, but the cost was high, and the quality was low. So AA decided to try 3d rendering as an alternative. The finish on the black speakers is the most difficult to photograph. It’s like a mirror, which calls for vast post work in photoshop on the photos to remove the studio reflections from the casing. In 3d you can control this much easier, although getting a nice reflection is still tough.

The other advantage to rendering in 3d is that the speakers don’t actually need to exist before they are rendered. More and more companies are catching on to this technology. Next step will be animating these speakers on the website product pages.

Hopefully one of these days we will do something more creative with Aperion. Cinema has the ability to animate parameters of any 3d object via the amplitude of an imported soundtrack. Very cool. How useful would that be for animating speakers?

Here’s an example of something a little more creative

Check out aperionaudio.com to see more renderings, and buy yourself some kick ass speakers while you’re at it!

I worked on the Nike ID space within Niketown New York with my friend Luis Rueda a while back. Luis has a background in architecture, and he often sketches out his retail spaces on the fly. His weapon of choice is a large, rolling, mechanical dry-erase board which prints the board’s contents onto a piece of paper. Pretty nifty.

This rendering is one of several that were done for the space. All rendered in c4d’s AR. This would have been a great VRay project.

My third project with Aperion, and my second with David Stewart consisted of a “Build Your Own System” project. This was an online application found on the Aperion website which allows people to drag and drop speakers into a pre-defined room, or the users can select from pre-configured systems. 

Aperion provided me with dimensions for 3 room sizes: large, medium, and small. David provided the direction as to what to place the rooms. This was another Vray project which posed many challenged. As you can see above, there is a large shag rug in the scene. I used Cinema’s hair plugin to create the rug, and we consistently ran into problems in rendering the simple scene, as the rug had too many polygons. It was quite the process getting this all rendered believe it or not. 

the second test was in how to “build” the rooms with flash. David’s direction was to animate all the elements into the room. This can be done pretty easily as long as you keep the footage one long animated image sequence right out of cinema. But David was wanting to get each furniture element as a separate file so that he could do the animation in flash, which was much more time consuming on the 3d side. 

Aperion’s budget and our schedule ended up being the defining answer as to which way to proceed. No animation at all.

Next challenge was rendering all the speakers within the 3 rooms. There are dozens of speakers, and you can pretty much put any of the speakers into any of the positions in the room. Front, front center, side, rear, ceiling, wall, etc. Becomes a little mind boggling. We ended up keyframing it out in cinema. So if there were 8 positions, each speakers would get rendered in each of the 8 positions. We had to make sure to place the pivot point of all speakers at the bottom rear of each speaker to make this as automated as possible. We also rendered an ambient occlusion pass and an alpha pass for each frame.

Last was to composite it all together in AE, which posed some issues. Vray’s physical camera tag does not match the default c4d camera, so when we rendered the AO pass, the camera angle was ever so slightly off. Very annoying. Overall it turned out pretty well.

A while back Nike hired me to work with Ziba Design to render out some concepts for a new store concept. My contact at Nike was Paul Loux and my contact at Ziba was Jonathon Irick. The renderings turned out ok despite not having VRay at the time.

This store is massive from a real world and 3d perspective. When working on 3d stores, it’s always a challenge to render a store out with as much product as this has, let alone work on it. The polygon count is enormous. This being the case, I planned to render this store using Vray, which was not available for Cinema 4d at the time. Vray is arguable the best render engine for architectural renderings.
I hired a 3ds max contractor and we began converting a massive amount of files from c4d to max. This process took quite a while.

As with most retail projects, my role is to model, light and texture scenes, position cameras, as well as providing initial merchandising. Visual merchandisers are often hard to find on a project until the project is almost finished, so typically once I am given rough direction as to which categories go where, I usually will toss together all the merchandising, and then run this past the VM’s. It’s just faster this way – especially on a store this size. Occasionally a VM is available at the beginning of a project, and some are very specific while other are quite vague. Totally depends in who I work with.

Originally started while I was freelancing in Brand Design, this is the longest projects I have worked on for Nike. While I was onsite in Brand, I worked with Luis Rueda to develop some initial global fixtures. Luis would provide rough sketches, I would model them up, and then we would sit together and refine them.

I eventually left Nike to go out on my own, and Luis hired me to work on the second portion of this project which included building out several store environments. I was still fairly new to 3d at this point, and there was an enormous amount of rendering work that needed to be done for the project. I was renting new macs from Mac Force at about $500 per week, and setting them up in my house in order to render the scenes out. My methods were pretty crude, and my technical abilities limited – so renderings that should have taken a couple hours to render were taking upwards of 30 hours each! And as a new Nike vendor money wouldn’t be coming any time soon.

After a while the project was complete, however the global retail guidelines book was not printed.

Some time later I inherited this project again. At this point all the work we had previously done was basically scrapped. We ended up building and rendering every Nike fixture and attachment to scale for use in the book. Greg Stobbs was the designer at Nike.

Pam Hroza worked with me on the merchandising of this global store and she was very detailed in what she wanted. Not much to do from my side.

As with most Nike projects, timelines are always tight and I end up working crazy hours. So these renderings were done with C4d’s native render engine. No GI. Never had the time for fancier renderings. Even with simplified renderings, many of the shots in this 4000sf store would not render. Out of memory errors were common and often meant final images had to be composited from multiple render passes.

This time the project was indeed finalized for good and a book with many of my renderings was printed and sent to all the Nike regions and departments that have anything to do with retail.