@ken28875 said:

This is awesome, Liam. Congrats.

Long time no write. I am back to the forum now after a year + of silence. I see that you have been busy.

You went to Vietnam? Nice. I was born there but left in the 70's after the war, and never had the chance to come back and visit.

Have a great weekend!

_KN

I could say the same about you! I saw you posted some updates to your game studio work. Yes I have moved to Sweden and hoping to get a job in 3D somehow...! I have applied to some game studios, product design firms etc, fingers crossed.

Vietnam was great, my brother was teaching there so we went out at Christmas to visit him, everybody was very nice but unfortunatley we got a lot of rain! However had a great time, now back in the freezing cold.

Great work, love the render of them all together. My only criticism would be to increase the number of edges in the wheel arches of the latest bus?

Nice work

@rich o brien said:

I do something similar in Blender as tests....

[attachment=0:mnnoo7kk]<!-- ia0 -->genome.png<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:mnnoo7kk]

It can animate displacement so you get pretty crazy results.

Yep thats the one, nice, I didnt know you could so particle displacement in Blender but then again what cant Blender do!

If I wasn't such an idiot I would hopefully like to learn that, I am still stuck in the 2D realm of software with the exception of sketchup!

I am just a few minutes from a hardened underground ex-airforce base, bonus the doors still work and according to a sign I read in the museum and it was designed to withstand a medium yield nuclear blast from only 1km away. I will be waiting in there...

A lot of my firends back in the UK have been asking how we are coping living under the Spectre of Russian Invasion (given helpful headlines from such esteemed headlines: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4033994/Sweden-warns-preparing-war-Officials-ordered-ensure-civil-defence-infrastructure-ready-fear-Russian-invasion-grows.html ) It's funny I was speaking to quite a few Swedish this week while working on a job and they are much more worried about the current US situation than what is perceived as the 'Russian' threat.

@pbacot said:

Cool. What is it? It could be a giant space anomaly or monster that eats starships or planets.

No idea, my girlfriend thought the second one I did today looked like a bird. The Trapcode suite looks pretty powerful for post Pro 3D: https://www.redgiant.com/products/trapcode-suite/

I would say its pretty reasonable at £999 however out of my price range at the moment while between jobs.

I did some work with Sketcchup and after effects today but the computer imploded and file is now corrupt. I am going to re-export it tomorrow and post it back here. It looked something like these tests I did

today:
https://youtu.be/gNhzVetorBg

and yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asuI08XvMNM

but those did not use any sketchup assets. I have been using a series of plugins called 'Trapcode' from Red Giant. https://www.redgiant.com/products/trapcode-suite/

It's very fun, if anybody has After Effects they should have a go!

Edit: As far as I can tell you get full access to the tools barring the red single pixel line cross watermark you can see in my videos.

@mike lucey said:

Only problem is that I wouldn't have OSX

You will get used to W10 in no time, I switch between both OS's daily and the only thing that always gets me is cmd/ctrl + copy/paste. I continually open up the toolbar in windows by mistake.... very annoying.

Also I do concede that the search facility in W10 is pathetic!

The middle part will emit some sort of light trail (think tron) when the spaceship is in boost mode.

So after a nice long pause in Vietnam for Christmas pretending I don't have to work or learn anything I am back getting this finished ( I hope).

So I learnt a lot from the Volvo VR demo I gave...this s*** is f****** difficult. Suffice to say its only spurned me on further. In the time sine I started I have learnt enough in blender to clean up some of my SU meshes, TRIS>QUADS etc.

And yes I could learn blender but I have been using SU now for over 10 years and its integral to my workflow, I am also incredibly quick using it. It is on my list don't get me wrong to learn other systems with the same proficiency, they just cost a lot more and take longer

So this weeks (its going to take more than a week) task is to take a relatively high poly model, clean it up in SU, take the texture maps in Thea, re-apply to a low poly model. Export to blender for cleanup and export into UE4.

Happy for anybody to point out anything I am doing wrong on the way, in fact please do!

So here is the model. Its a kit bash from some things I have already done and bits and bobs from the warehouse. I am getting pretty good with poly reduction, currently working on my third real life game so used to optimising meshes by now.

EDIT: for clarity planning to do a chase camera and cockpit camera from the model.

This is amazing work.... love the floor level decals!

@pbacot said:

I think they should be in NASCAR!

So will driverless cars be able to exceed the speed limit? Make me wonder with all the regulations why is ANY street vehicle made without a governor to keep it within the speed limit or a maximum speed determined by highway engineers? I like to speed as much as the next guy but it is stupid. Sure people will cheat but how many can even change a belt on cars the way they are built these days? It's said they are considering that electric vehicles must make noise for the safety of pedestrians. That's half-assed, compared to simply installing governors on all new cars. It's about profit, not safety.

But to answer the question, I don't think the effect will be discernible given the already low state of political awareness.

I have had a go round a pre-built circuit in driverless launch mode, terrifying and amazing at the same time. We covered this a lot when I worked for WIRED and the general consensus is that it seems quite safe when on motorways/highways, and from the recent study I posted earlier (in the US at least) it is safer than non-driving vehicles.

If the motorway itself can be automated then I see no reason why the speed limit cannot be increased substantially. I have been on the Autobahn in Germany a few times without incident.... touch wood

However a lot more would need to change in infrastructure rather than vehicles themselves to handle say a car having a blowout at 100MPH+ etc.

@baz said:

Love the style. Looking forward to seeing this progress.

Thanks, cant take credit for it all. I used an overlay from the style builder 'competition winners pack', (no idea if it comes with SU or if I have downloaded it from somewhere?).

I did a standard Clay render in Thea and overlaid the sketch style over the top. I then added a few colours in Photoshop and then used some layer masks to bleed the colour away from the area surrounding the roof terrace.

I am helping design a roof terrace for an apartment in Palma, Spain. So far I have roughly modelled the building that took a while since the only references I had are Google Earth and Street View (but wow what a difference they made!),

Its not usual for my to make anything outside of my usual illustrative style so I imagine I should learn a lot.

Thanks for the spot, have signed up to that.

How did you do the water, is it just a png?

After Investigating Tesla's Deadly Autopilot Crash, Feds Say Hooray For Self-Driving

Tesla's Autopilot system isn't defective, investigators say—and it's stopping crashes.

WIRED (www.wired.com)

"Instead, the agency exculpated Tesla, and then some. It crunched the numbers to find that among Tesla cars on the road, those carrying its Autosteer technology, which can keep the car within clear lane markings, crashed 40 percent less frequently than those without."

@hellnbak said:

Very impressive work.

I do have one question tho - how do you keep your desktop so neat?? When I do clean mine (rarely), 10 minutes later it once again looks like a toxic waste landfill site

If you mean the computer desktop its not tidy its just all folders are hidden. If you mean the actual desk, well my girlfriend would not let me keep it messy, I do try!

I shall post some work to go with that!

@boofredlay said:

Amazing work.

cheers!