My how time flies! AliasDesign posted the third installment of my natural surfacing demo. Check it out here!
I’m slated to deliver some more demos and tutorials in the future, so if there is something the community is looking to see, drop me a line or leave a comment!
Cheers,
J.
Part II of the my Natural Surfacing demonstration is online now. Check it out! Hope you find it useful and happy surfacing.
Cheers,
J.
Hey all. My latest demo has been posted on the Alias Design website. This will be a three part series where I walkthrough a variety of surfacing techniques mainly focused on sculpting product surfaces with as few patches as necessary. Check see the demonstration here.
By the end of the series, most of the detail of the watch above will have been put into the model – so stay tuned! And please, if you have any questions, don’t forget to leave a comment…
Cheers,
J.
Yay! A post for 2008! Happy New Year (and a few days… or more).
Sometimes Often times I struggle to come up with neat tricks for this blog. Then I stumble on something and someone points out that it would be good blog fodder. Here’s one case and point..Anyone who knows me, knows that my current design tool fascination is real-time rendering. I just think it’s the most time saving thing for us product designers. It just eliminates so many steps of the ‘process’ and accelerates us toward our visions faster than ever.
Alias Studio (my design tool of choice) has some pretty nice real-time visualization features, but since the features are fairly new to the tool, there are always additional features I wish for whilst using them. One such is to have a bit more control over the Image Based Lighting (IBL) set-up. There are some nice tone-mapping features, but no features that control the placement of the IBL image itself.
In this example, I have a product design from my archive that has had shaders assigned, ambient occlusion calculated and an image loaded into the IBL slot of my environment. The image is from HDRI-Studio and is a panoramic image of a professional photo-studio set-up. It’s a nice quick way of getting a real photographic look without much configuration or knowhow.
But by definition, the image based lighting set-up uses a static image to generate both the lights and reflections you see on your display. Without the ability to move the IBL, you can’t really move the lights. They are one and the same.
Inevitably, there are things about the light set-up that don’t suit the image. I’ve outlined a few things in this image that didn’t suit me. Aside from the details highlighted – one of the main features of this particular IBL image is the warm/cool lighting. From this vantage point, the face of the product is getting the full brunt of the blue-tinted light.
My workaround is pretty simple – I group the model geometry to the 3D view’s camera.
Now when I select the top level of the group, I can rotate about the z-axis and the model and the camera spin in tandem. The visual effect though is the opposite – it looks like the IBL image is spinning and now I can find my perfect lighting set-up. Below is the mouse shortcuts from the Alias manual. I use the right most mouse button to constrain my object rotation to just the z-axis. (You can rotate about other axes, but if you are using the reflection plane in your shaded view, you’ll get undesirable results because the plane itself is locked to the world coordinates – much like the IBL – and not the camera and/or the object.)
This movie should illustrate the effect. Keep in mind, it’s the model and the camera moving, not the lights…
Click to See Movie
After finding an angle that best shows off the form and materials, I can tweak my tone-mapping controls, make any last minute shader adjustments and I have a final image.
Another nice thing about this set-up is that the camera “eye” is still free to move within the 3D viewport. So I can navigate to the back of the product, then select the top level group again and adjust the lighting and I have an instant other view.
This whole image (not including the documentation) took less than an hour to set-up and output.
Every once and a while Jenn gets asked about the photos in her shop. I’m proud to be her photo guy!
I’ve had the privilege to do a lot of product photo shoots with Teague’s photographer Doug Evans. And he’s shared more than a few tips with me. Thanks, Doug!
Here’s my little set-up:
I love my camera. I’ve had it for a couple years and it has never let me down. If you’re interested in photography, I highly recommend getting a digital SLR. I had 35 mm EOS 650 since high school and had a lot of fun with it, but it wasn’t until I started shooting digital that I (think) I really started to understand photography.
Now for the dumpster diving. My lights were a lucky find. One day while walking past a dumpster I saw a big black suitcase-looking thing. Curious, I pulled it out and found a nice little set of photo lights! I used them as decoration for a long time until Jenn needed photos of her products. I tried using desk lamps, but my exposures were way too long to be useful. So I plugged in those lights I had found long ago, and they worked! I’ve used them for all the 900-some photos I’ve shot for Jenn.
Oddly enough, my tripod was a dumpster find too. Either I’m lucky or I have a problem.
Happy shooting!
Update!
A few things came to mind after I posted this, um, post.
I didn’t mention that I try to shoot at f5.6 with a 72 mm focal length. This is the max that my lens will do. Sometimes 72 mm is a bit too long because my tripod can’t get up high enough or whatever, but that’s my goal. Of course, being a non-full-frame sensor on the Canon means it’s really like shooting at about 115 mm. Shooting at f5.6 gives me a fair amount of shallow depth of field effect.
My exposures are usually about 1/20 of a second. I did mention that shooting with a desk lamp resulted in exposures too slow to be useful, and 1/20 isn’t really a fast shutter speed either, but it’s way faster than what I was shooting at. I would love to have some real flashes, but that is getting too fancy even for me – unless I found some in a dumpster.
I shoot RAW format and do all my image processing in iPhoto 7. I love iPhoto. It does a great job with RAW files and I love that the latest version makes nondestructive edits to your files – like Aperture, but cheaper. I do much of my exposure and gamma correction in iPhoto along with any white balance tweaks. I calibrate my camera when I shoot, but sometimes there is a slight drift a few K here and there. Did I mention that I love iPhoto?
I do any pixel level editing in Photoshop. Usually this involves miscellaneous touch-up and bleaching out the background to a pure white. I try to get the background pure white during the shoot, but in evitably, there is a bit of vingetting due to the zoom lens, or I have to shoot just slightly dark to capture the texture in the white felt that Jenn likes to use. White on white isn’t easy, but that’s what Photoshop is for.
I have some Automator scripts set-up to convert the large 8 megapixel images down to something manageable for the web. I keep 3 versions of every file – the RAW file (in iPhoto) a editted TIFF at full resolution (these are suitable for printing) and the low resolution JPEG. We keep the images cataloged by date and I archive to DVD-ROM at the end of each year.
I also find DIY Photography a great resource for tips and tricks.
I hope the added info was helpful, maybe even interesting…
Cheers,
J.