Inspired by a terrific photograph named “Coffee Memories” by Jordan Keramidas, I have made “Nostalgia”. No matter how you try, you cannot surpass the sense of casual creativity and beauty omnipresent in nature. But I feel proud even to feel that I tried to get close. Keeping in mind that I did this in mere 3 days, the result is pretty satisfactory. There is always room for further alterations, but that does not necessarily make things more beautiful or significant than they...

Urban/industrial decay can show a lot of character and has a lot of stories to tell. I always wanted to listen to those stories and translate them to 3D. But time was always of essence. After a few not-so-mentionworthy pieces, this was one of my better urban decay studies. I broke the inertia of staying in XSI all the time and finally did this one in Maya (MentalRay), with some help from Photoshop and ZBrush, of course. Felt good to realize I did not forget how things work over there. Like most...

Every artist has one or a handful of themes of choice. Urban decay is one of mine. I have drawn lots of (not very presentable) sketches of urban decay over the years. This was my first publishable render on urban decay. It took me about 2 weeks from start to finish. I worked only at leisure and waited for response from my friends in forums, that’s why it took longer than it should have. I have used XSI 7.01 (Mental Ray 3.6) with Photoshop and just a little bit of Zbrush. This work has been...

Scribbling with crayons here…

Nice painting =)

More sketches =)

Lotsa cool Photos!

Even more Photos! =)

More Photos

While using MentalRay, especially with Max’s invaluable Blend Material, the pass system (called RenderElements in Max) starts to give you quirks. Not all of these quirks are completely avoidable. But with some experience, a very good image can still be produced. Rendering with 3DS Max in passes, advantages of using 32bit passes, how to composite these passes in Fusion, advantages of tools like Fusion over tools like Photoshop, and many other things have been discussed in the third and final...

Second in the 3 part tutorial series, this instalment focuses on texturing and shading. Both areas are much talked about, most interesting and perhaps the most confusing among all steps necessary to design a shot from start to finish. When MentalRay is used as the rendering engine, things get really complex, because of 3D Studio Max’s sophomoric implementation of the same. Unlike Vray, MentalRay comes with several shaders. When not applied appropriately, they may slow down rendering quite a...

First of the 3 part tutorial series, this instalment deals with modelling and laying out the UVs. Everything has been done inside 3DS Max 2009. Max has a robust modelling tool-set, but sometimes simple task becomes daunting there due to the superfluity of tools. That was exactly the issue I had in mind when I wrote this. There probably are many other ways of achieving same result, as it often is the case in CG projects. Basic as the dealing may be, it is no-nonsense and precise. This was the first...