don't mesh with us

Living room - render time 46 minutes with mental ray in maya

Phew! My first attempt at high quality render.

This was really fun to do. I followed this tutorial for modeling the rug, table and part of the chair. Lamp, the room and the painting on the wall (the picture is my friend’s Pablo’s awesome collage) and the shape of the chair are my own. Lighting and rendering I learned from Lynda.com tutorials, which I totally recommend.

This is nowhere near perfect yet. Issues I have with it:

1. Chair is too glossy. Looks like plastic.
2. Rug and the table are too edgy.
3. Painting needs a glass over it.
4. Lamp shade is too grainy and doesn’t look very real.
5. The wall is too spotty.
6. The lighting is too strong.

Other than that, I am actually quite pleased how it turned out.

Filed under: Heikki's posts by Heikki Veikko
2 Comments »

Tribute to Pablo

My first real render with Maya following this tutorial. I got inspiration to customize it from Pablo‘s work, who is an amazing art graphic artist and my good friend.

I like how there’s a slight shadow in the corner of the back wall and how there’s a very subtle shadow casting backwards on the base of the temple.

I do not understand how lightning works yet.

gears

Holy crap this model was frustrating to do. Note to self: do not ever touch booleans and don’t except bevel to work. I made this following this tutorial.

Open for interpretation

Done with this tutorial.

Filed under: Heikki's posts by Heikki Veikko
No Comments »

The long and dark winter is over. Spring is here and I have a lot more energy.

Last weekend (and monday) I had a project. Me and my friends have this annual event, which needs an online signup, so I volunteered to make a website.

Last year the site looked like this. It was the first website I made since.. well, 2004, so it looks very dull and simple. I’ve improved a lot, as I’ve made these: Miika’s lifestyle blog, a recipe site(which was never completed),a fun little experimental site and this blog. This blog was by far the hardest to do, because I had to create a wordpress theme from scratch, but with every project I’ve learned something new. With this project I learned a bit of HTML5 and using 960px grid system framework.

Here's the sketch from photoshop.

The new barwars site took me about 3 days. 1+½ days to think of the design, and 1+½ days to code. I wanted to use HTML5 and 960.gs. I really really liked to work with 960 gs. It made things so easy. I think I’m going to use some kind of grid system on all of my website project from now on. For those who wonder what 960 gs is, it’s a grid system where the site is divided in 12 (or 16 )  columns and with it you can easily align every element nicely with each other. And it’s easy to use. Div class container_12 to make a new row, div class grid_n to make an element with n column’s width, div class push_n or pull_n to move the element between the columns and div clear to end the row.  And that’s it, every element in page are nicely aligned with each other.

With the design, I wanted to convoy the idea of beer + metro + helsinki. I went with pretty obvious solutions. The background is beer. There’s helsinki city silhouette and there’s a metro. For those who don’t see any metro, you are probably using firefox, internet explorer or opera. CSS animations don’t work in any other browser than chrome and safari unfortunately. I didn’t take this project that seriously that I would have wanted to hazzle with javascript so I didn’t make it work in FF or IE. The animations are kinda goofy, but so is the event.

I could improve the typography on the site, and I should put final touches to the overall design and code, but for now, it is good. Any criticism is welcome!

Looking forward to the actual event!

Filed under: Heikki's posts by Heikki Veikko
No Comments »

I found some photos I took last autumn here in Rovaniemi. I had totally forgotten about them, until today, when I went through my photos from last year.
Some of them were pretty neat!

Incoming storm, but the sun was still shining. This is the view from my back yard!

That last picture was a part of this huge panorama. Click to view full.

Magical blue moment, sininen hetki. Right after the sunset.

Would you believe this was taken in Rovaniemi?

There's a lake (or pond, it's so small) next to my apartment and it's full of birds in the summer. Although I only got to shoot ducks.

Abandoned building we found in the industrial area. Fortunately this was no longer in use.

PS. Sorry I haven’t updated lately. It’s just we haven’t done anything in school I could post here yet. We’ve had a typography, photography and graphic design technology courses, but we haven’t finished them yet, so I can’t post anything (yet). But I will. Soon!

Filed under: Heikki's posts by Heikki Veikko
No Comments »

Just a quick update, I am too busy to babble. Here are some of the works from our Photoshop basics class:

The mission was to do a generic album cover like this.

Movie poster for the movie The Fly. We had to use at least 2 photos and combine them in a plausible way.

It’s a quickly done variant of a Russian sea painter Aivazovsky’s painting Shipwreck. I named it “Spaceshipwreck”.

And here we had to do self portraits of two contradictory side of yourself and display them as diptych. I’m supposedly a stiff face made of chrome (techology), but enjoy planting saplings like crazy (nature). The other one had to be done with collage technique, and the other one with brushes.

The right one was made in ArtRage. I was inspired to try it out when I saw this painting .
I got a little lazy and didn’t finish it. But here you go.

Filed under: Heikki's posts by Heikki Veikko
No Comments »

He’s the protector of Pyhä fjeld and he’s thousand years old. He’s gentle and kind to those who treat nature with respect and humility, but will punish those who abuse it.

We were given a few little tales about Huttu-Ukko from which we had to make a general illustration. I immediately got the idea for Huttu-Ukko to be kind of ogrish, mysterious and maybe a little sad guardian of the Pyhä fjeld. He would be watching the Pyhä -area from his snowglobe somewhere in the darkness.

I saw a youtube video of somebody doing a deadpool character in zBrush. I was amazed how easy and fun it seemed.  With zBrush you can do all kinds of amazing things. I got immediately inspired to try this program. I have been reluctant to try any 3D softwares, because I have felt they are hard to learn and require lots and lots of time to accomplish even the smallest thing. zBrush seemed different.

I watched a couple of tutorial videos and started sculpting. It IS easy and fun to sculpt. Although I didn’t have the skills to do proper beard or hair nor did I have any idea how to texturize or colourize the model and I didn’t get the best rendering result, I’m happy with my first real sculpt. Snow globe, colors and other postwork I did in Photoshop.

And purely by chance, today one of our teachers asked if somebody wanted to participate in a 3D -modelling club they have with a few older graphic design students. They are using Maya with additional textures and plugins for hair etc. Hell yes! I may dig deeper into this 3D…

I’ll probably post a lot more of my work from school now that second period is almost over. Now — off to work!

Filed under: Heikki's posts by Heikki Veikko
No Comments »