HI Guys,

Need a little help. Can you take a look at the attached diagram, and answer this for me:

The diagram shows an arch, supported on two pillars. The arch is NOT a full half-circle, and as the diagram shows, the arch meets the towers at an angle of 73 degrees. The tops of the towers are horizontal. So, assuming the arch is securely fixed to tops of the towers, what percentage of the arch's weight is pressing down vertically, and what percentage is applying a side-ways force to the pillars. To make the maths simple, let's say the arch weighs 10kg (it doesn't really!)What are the loadings? Waaaaay out of my depth here, people!

All help is REALLY appreciated.

thanks,

Andy.

Nice job! Great models, and a really good presentation too.

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To follow on, and hopefully be constuctive, I've done a quick paint-over on one of you renders Smokin' (hope you don't mind) - to show what I meant about strengthening the directional lighting, and adding a bit of 'punch' to the image. Hope this helps.

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Hi. Think the problem is that these scenes appear to be lit largely with ambient light. An interior scene like this would be lit entirely with artificial light, which will be more directional and give more defined shadows. This will give your renders more contrast, depth and energy. And yeah, as said the tiling of textures needs a little work. Don't want to come across too negative though, as I think there's the beginnings of something really good in here

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Great images. Really nicely 'framed' compositions, and a very informative, yet also loose style.
Nice one.

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Thanks guys - always appreciated.

Nigel (derryatlanta) - no rubies used. Just built the roof profiles by eye, and hand-stitched it all together. (only built a quarter of the roof, then copied/mirrored it around). The fore-ground fence was a bt of a dilema. Ultimately, we decided it didn't look too specifically present-day, and having something real in the foreground helped to sell the whole illusion. I did paint - over a few posts that looked to perfect and contemporary.
The photo was actually taken in Wales about 10 miles from my home, but you're right - the wind up there cuts right through you!

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Just finished a fun little project, and got permission to post it here...
Brief was for an illustration for a book cover: a landscape including a viking settlement, but with evidence of previous, pre-historic settlement on the same site.

I was given this reference photo for the type of environment required:

I then modelled the stuctures in SU:

These were rendered in MAX:

And heres the final piece. You'll see that I extended the supplied photo with a mixture of hand-painting and additional photo reference. The sky was replaced with several new photos and a few hand-painted clouds. The standing stones came from several other photos, with additional texture hand-painted, as were the shadows to 'sit' them into the landscape. Because the final piece was to be monochrome, I could get away without matching colours too precisely, as long as the tonal-ranges matched.
The composition looks bit odd, but keep in mind that the left-half of the image is the back-cover of the book, with a lot of text etc to be added, and the right-half of the image is the front cover, with the title and author name to be added.

And a little close-up view...

Thanks for looking ...

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It is a Multi-Tooth (or 'star') washer. Some people call them spring-washers - but this isn't correct.

EDIT - to be pedantic, the type you've shown is an 'inside-star' washer. Some have the teeth on the outside, and are called...you guessed it....

HTH

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"there are lots of matte painters (pro-level ones) who will freely admit they can't paint for toffee." Ain't that sad.... And yet some whose work is largely photo-based, are also great painters - I'm thinking of Dylan Cole, whose concept sketches blow me away as much as the finished pieces. I think (hope) real artistry will always shine-though. Only last week I was looking at some of Michael Pangrazio's old work for the first Star Wars Trilogy. Old-school painting on glass. It's amazing how loose his brush work was, and yet how well it read on film.

Anyhow, keep on keeping on

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Ecuadorian: Although I now use Painter, I spent a while working wth Artrage - you can certainly get equally good results with this great little package. Painter does make the whole process a little easier, but then you do pay for it!

Alex: just taken the time to look over your re-vamped (pun not intended) website. Nice to see the new stuff in there! What I particularly like about your work is that even the 'photo-real' matte work retains a subtle painterly quality. For reasons I can't quite pin-down, this style always seems to integrate a litte better with the original filmed footage than the ultra-slick cgi style that is so prevelant now. Perhaps because the paint strokes are reminiscent of film-grain...? (although know you also add grain digitally) I hope the increasing trend to film on-set with digital cameras won't mean a decline in this painterly style.

cheers,

Andy.

Alex!! Was wondering where you'd been. Obviously busy by the looks of things
Lovely work, as always. Hopefully we'll be seeing you more regularly on here.

cheers,

Andy.

hobbnob - you need to register for the tutorials here: http://www.sketchucation.com/wp-login.php?action=register

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Thanks Guys.
I can take no credit for the design I'm afraid. The way it works is that the competing teams or the GLXP organisers send me sketches, engineering drawings, or sometimes just written descriptions of the proposed designs, which I then interpret into something that is (hopefully) visually appealing. This usually means I have a little room for interpretation.

In practice this means that often the models are fairly simple (see the clay render below, often built only to be viewed from one camera angle, and I can then fake quite a lot with some half-decent texturing and lighting!

The GLXP is still at quite an early stage, so most designs are still fairly conceptual - although I suspect a couple of teams are close to producing flight-ready hardware.

Thought I'd share my latest piece produced for the Google Lunar Xprize - http://www.googlelunarxprize.org. SU model, Max render, project time approx 2hrs. Fairly straightforward model - although the wheels nearly reduced me to tears...

Andy

Sounds good. Downloading now!!

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Great to have you onboard Richard. Fantastic work, can't wait to see more.

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That's exactly what your model reminded me of!

The Gnomes That Time Forgot!!!....

Nice idea... ...I'm on it....

Hope it's OK to post this here - as there's no SketchUp in it (yet) !

This is something I'll be working on over the coming weeks in spare moments. Wanted to produce something with a bit more modelled detail than my usual approach (normally a quick model and a lot of post-work in Photoshop). Anyhow, I was doodling in PS, and this sketch kind of 'appeared'. Seemed to have potential for an interesting SU model. I'll post updates when I get the chance to do some more work on this.

Comments welcome as usual

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