Paul Cézanne: Master Study

Today I decided to try and mimic the style and compositions of Paul Cézanne, a French post-impressionist. I don't know too much about him, just that he's done a mash of landscapes / objects and cubist stuff.  I found it quite challenging, working from already stylized paintings.

Like yesterday, I took around 20 minutes for the value sketch and 10 minutes for the color pass. So 30 minutes per sketch.

Kind regards,

Pim

Rembrandt van Rijn: Master Study

Since I'm quite enjoying practicing digital painting, I felt like making it a little more interesting by doing a couple of studies based on one artist. Today, Rembrandt van Rijn. Tomorrow, I'm not sure, but since it is the weekend I'll have plenty of time to find an artist I like.

For the value sketch I took around 20 minutes to get sufficient amount of detail in. The color didn't take as long, so I guess about 30 minutes per sketch.

Kind regards,

Pim

Noah Bradley: Master Study

I've started working on my paint skills as I am having a blast at Grid doing look development but am looking for more painterly activities next to texturing and shading.

Currently following the advice of Noah Bradley and making very fast / short (~10 minute) lighting sketches from other paintings. So far I've used a book called "Color and Light" by James Gurney as my main reference as I know myself and can't cheat like this. Below are the results from the past three days.

Kind regards,
Pim

Müllerthal Hike

Went on a small hike with my girlfriend. 70 km along the Müllerthal Trail in Luxembourg. Fantastic environment but the weather could have been better.

First day. Wrong turn made for 3km of asphalt.

Second day. Working our way up.

Third day. Change of scenery.

Cows.

I'm into taking square pictures now. Kind regards,

Pim

Dr. Guislain Psychiatric Center Museum

So I've thought about several ways to boot this blog up again since I'm starting to feel creative again but can't really figure out the best way to provide some nice content. I picked up my camera a while ago and started shooting pictures, practicing my eyes for color combinations, compositions and possible tiny details and nice places. I'm still in the process of learning, which really just translates to hating everything I shoot and keeping the 1%.

A small while before starting work at Grid-vfx I really got into photographing the sky. We had some heavy storms, lots of rain and thunder, which provided nice material to practice on. Below some of the ones I liked.

Then my girlfriend did a photo shoot with our small plant collection, currently consisting out of a bunch of vegetable plants and herbs and while she is even more trigger happy than I am, the pictures turned out quite nice. I did some -arguable okay- cropping and color correction on a number of them. Below some of the ones we liked.

Lavender

Literally no idea

Rosemary (crawling)

Tomatoplant

And I am still not finished yet. Today, my girlfriend's parents visited us in Ghent and we headed to the Psychiatric Center Dr. Guislain. It's a seriously awesome place, the building is beautiful and the inside is unique and interesting. We even saw some guys walking around that made us think the psychiatric ward was actually still in use. Anyways, pictures!

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EDIT: After a quick google, apparently the actual psychiatric ward shares the ground with the museum. This probably explains our encounter.

And that was it again. Probably going to do this a little more often as I really like shooting pictures. I feel that for me it's not as creatively fulfilling as CG art or VFXing is. It comes close though, so that's good enough for me to continue playing around with it.

Thanks for watching and reading like always!

Kind regards,

Pim

Game Design graduate & Look Development at Grid-VFX

It's been quite a while since I've blogged about anything. This is partly due to the fact that my graduation was a brutal period but also because my colleague (Niek van Gorp) and I made a deal not to post anything related to our graduation online. This was motivated by the fact that we set up a really ambitious project and didn't want to spoil anything.

So first a quick heads up of the last couple of months. I started my graduation, finished my final retake, got my driving license, graduated from IGAD, celebrated my birthday (24 aye), moved back to Ghent, took up some freelance work and applied at Grid-VFX for a spot in their Look Development team and was accepted! I'm a week in now and although Mari is a tough cracker, I'm having a lot of fun. Cool beans!

To fill the downtime I got in contact with a small studio in Nuenen, near Eindhoven, called SoMMedia and made some models for them. Hopefully they'll be of use in their production. For me it was good practice as I hadn't modeled in some time.

As for my graduation, this was accompanied by a presentation, or oral defense as the institution likes to call it. I'd rather call it more like a semi-professional assessment of "what-went-right-and-what-went-wrong".

Right now I'm settling into the working life, doing 9 to 6 everyday, groceries in the weekend, DIYing during the evenings, studying and partying during the time that is left (none). My girlfriend set up a small garden project so now we're growing broccoli, tomatoes and bunch of herbs in an old euro pallet. I guess all I do is eat them with eggs for breakfast.

And we saw that new Disney movie the other day, Inside Out. Awesome stuff! The subject matter is very relatable and incredibly polished. The intro is so wonderfully choreographed while the rest of the movie lets you focus on the story, which was actually quite deep. To my amazement, at the end of the film, much of the theater was whimpering and squalling. It was terrific!

Off to sleep now, tomorrow (a day off) a long day of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm terrified.

Kind regards,
Pim

ps. I noticed this blog post was featured on Walvin Media Daily News so here's an infinite loop. In case you're actually coming from there, please go here to read some actual blogging instead. I'm sure you're not actually interested in reading this 'life'-update.

Miniature Town VFX Compositing Breakdown

In the downtime between the final two phases of my education I've rounded up a final course and decided to start working on a compositing breakdown for the finished phase. Can't say I've spent much time getting it picture perfect, but alas; putting it out there anyways. Below is a Vimeo video. I like their layout much better than YouTube's layout for blog formats.

Secondly, since graduating has come into the picture there had been a necessity to figure something out for that as well. I was carrying a fairly solid idea around for quite a while and contacted a few ex-colleagues at Grid-VFX about it. However, after discussing the subject with a lecturer at my education, the idea was quickly dropped. The scope, for a single person project, was far too ambitious and the market too saturated for this type of work. I'd like to spill the beans, but it's still something I'd like to work on. Just not for my graduation project.

Then a colleague student and good friend suggested we could try and combine our graduation projects as he found himself at the same crossroads. This, of course, is very risky business, but would undoubtedly enable us to create something much more impressive. A safe gamble was put on a cinematic 'space scene' short focused around a comet in a sort of perpetual motion. Unfortunately the "cinematic short market" is so incredibly saturated with these type of videos, even the notion of it was quickly disapproved by our supervisor. Although we were unpleasantly surprised by this response, we had to acknowledge the fact that it was true. A link to an animated storyboard is found below.

As for the future of this blog in relation to updates regarding this graduation of ours, I'll have to discuss whether or not my companion is okay with me writing monthly updates. It's safe to say that since that moment the creative juices have been flowing.

In the meantime I've spent some time learning this software package called Agisoft Photoscan. It can generate dense points clouds using a process called photogrammetry. It's really awesome. Below are some quick results. The results are especially great for measurements.

Living room chair

Garden pots and junk

Basement full circular capture pt. 1

Basement full circular capture pt. 2

In any case, thanks for reading,

Pim