Here is a scene rendered with Octane using only an HDRI sky. The materials are from the live Octane database. The scene is nonsense, just some random geometry, but the takeaway here is the quality of light and the way it reacts to the different material types. The beauty of un-biased rendering is starting to make itself apparent to me.

I did it. I went ahead and bought the Octane Render standalone and the C4D plug in. I believe this is the future of rendering and I can’t see going back. Now I want to buy a PC and load it up with 4 Titan video cards. I’ve gone from CPU lust to GPU lust.

These renders were made using nothing more than an HDRI image. The specularity, gloss, and reflection are nothing short of astounding. And you can see your render as you work, making for a better composition and easier material tweaking. These renders don’t really show off the quality of light. I’ll post some daylight scenes soon. In the meantime, check out Octane!

I downloaded a free demo of Octane renderer and I’m blown away with the results and workflow. Before I pull the trigger and buy it, I tried to get the same results with C4D’s built-in Physical renderer. The results are very nice, but not quite the same. This is a scene file downloaded from rainasawrus.

God Damn, Plexus is fun. Spent an evening making this montage.

Let me preface this post by saying that I am, perhaps, the world’s worst photographer. I really am. So I borrowed a Canon T2i from work to shoot some instructional video, and I tested it out on some stuff near my desk. This is the result – shot in very low light and not doctored, save for a bit of level correction in PhotoShop.

I didn’t really mean to make this. I started playing around with the R14 sculpting tools and I made a bunch of junk and began lighting it. Then I made a cushion, which naturally, turned into this. No point, really.

I made this using nothing but After Effects. When it comes to making style frames, I tend to work faster in AE than in PhotoShop. This is all done using layer styles and lots of layers.

I’ve been toying with the idea of adding tutorials to this site since its inception. Like most things in life, plans are one thing, but reality is another. After much thought (ok, about 10 minutes), I decided to create a completely separate website to house tutorials. That site will be called The Occasional Class. This is a logo idea for the site. Not usually a fan of random geometric background thing, but it kind of works. Not final, but appealing, nonetheless.

There is a moment in time where a bunch of design trends converge and you have something like this. Cute internet name, long shadow, Brandon Grotesque, and flat design. This will look dated soon, but let’s just revel in the here and now. It’s 2013, Godamnit.

This whole thing was made in Cinema 4D. Even the type.

There’s a fantastic Indian restaurant that just opened up a block from our place. The thing is, their signage is so bad, we thought it was a dump as we passed by several times. Turns out, it is splendidly great. The owners are so nice, I thought I would make them a new logo. And yes, it is called Great Indian Food. This is just a draft. I need to kern the type and line things up. My design chops are a bit rusty.