Archives for January, 2008
Tutorial: How to Make a Shiny GUI Icon in Photoshop
Friday, January 11th, 2008
This icon is designed in the popular shiny style that we all know and love, possibly hate. It’s heavily influenced by Apple’s iPhone icon and GUI environment.
The icon shown here is for a “settings” control, hence the gear-clock, and muted colors. It’s shown in both the off and on state.
There are two main elements that make up this image; the icon button, and the icon graphic. The icon button is the common element that gives all the icons in a GUI a consistent look -think of it as the background. The icon graphic is the part that visually describes the purpose of the icon. This tutorial is about the icon background.
Theater Render: Express
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Fabrics! The room is all fabric. Its so much more fun to render rooms with glossy wood or paint to get a lot of play with the reflects, but not this time.
I’ve always had a hard time to get a real realistic fabric look. Looking at the close up shot, you can see the texture of the black diamond panel, but to me it looks more like cork board than anything else. The bump map is a ‘cellular’ procedural map, rather than the usual ‘noise’ that I use. I gets the look a I’m going for a bit better, but its still not where I want to be. The black fabric is called “Sensa” and it has a nice sheen to it in real life. I tried to recreate this here, but I think it looks more like a painted surface in some areas (see the front view by the base board).
If anyone has any tips on getting a good fabric look, please let me know!
The alabaster sconces were working with me this time. Sometimes alabaster can be a real bitch. I don’t know how many times I’ve searched google for help on rendering alabaster (to no avail). I’m thinking this will be one of the first tutorials I put up here. These do not use Sub Surface Scattering, btw, however I’ve been wanting to learn about SSS for some time now.
This was a very awkward room from a design standpoint. It has a vaulted ceiling, and there is no real “back” of the theater. I will post the existing room photos to explain it better. Lots of windows too; I believe HTS will be installing motorized black-out shades. The renders only show the very front of the room, none of the windows or stairs.
Originally designed for Chris Lam of Home Theater Solutions. The room is roughly 20′ x 19′ x 8′5″h. The screen is measured at 110″ diagonal.
Theater Render: Tearoom
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
This one took about 8 hours from breaking down the AutoCAD .dwg to being able to render the final scene. The renderings themselves took about 15 min each.Everything was modeled from scratch except the theater chairs and the sconce -These were already in my library.
One of the things I love about tackling architectural scenes is that the modeling is a piece of cake. -Just straight lines, no organic objects to create.
This is a pretty small room to build a full-blown dedicated theater, but it still works with just one row of seating. The only real odd thing about it is that the floor is wood. This may make the room sound a bit too “live” with it reflecting the sound so much, but it was important to the client to keep it in -and thats really all that matters at the end of the day.
Originally designed for Zack Deily of Definitive Electronics. The room measures about 14′ x 14′ x 10′h, screen is 95″ x 56″.
- Existing Room Photo - front
- Existing Room Photo - left
- Existing Room Photo - right
- Existing Room Photo - back
Salesmen Ride the Beasts of Burden
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
I had a realization the other day that 95% of what I do at work goes to waste. Everyday is a bloody, epic battle within these two monitors, and the only people who get anything out of it seem to be salesmen. These guys get the sale handed to them on a silver platter and don’t even notice the giblets of time and frustration splattered all over it. ‘Oblivious’ wouldn’t even begin to describe it.
The goal of this site is to fix all that. I figure there are deserving people out there who can gain from my daily scirmishes with 3ds max, Adobe products (I’m looking at you Illustrator), and design challenges in general.
A little background; my primary job is to create 3d renders for home theater interiors, however, a lot of my days go to creating basic marketing materials, websites, and dealing with obscure design challenges. I work at Cinema Design Group, International as Creative Director.
I’m going to start off by posting projects as they are completed with a little summary on what was involved. Eventually I’d like to do some tutorials, and a place to post technical questions. It seems everyday I run into random annoyances/issues with the software I use that are too obscure to find a quick answer on google. I think it’d be useful to document these as they come to provide a place that can be found by others having the same headache.
Also, I’d like to thank Paddy Ryan for the Wordpress layout. Hopefully when I get some time I will be able to design my own!
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