ZOO

Today, we decided to visit the Zoo of Antwerp. It was a nice train trip, the weather was great and there were some Belgian youth hopping in and out of the queue for the tickets. Probably because they were smash hammered and kept forgetting what they were waiting for in the first place. The mental image makes me smirk.

Took along my camera, but I didn't check the battery at home and had only 20% to shoot with. Alas.

Thanks,

Pim

Rendering with jf_nested_dielectric

Lately I've been trying to try to achieve realistic dispersion and refraction for my Arnold shaders and noticed a massive increase in render time. Switching to alShaders solved most of this, by their Russian Roulette concept. Today I found the "jf_nested_dielectric" Arnold shader and it is perfect for super light and realistic results, only I can't find a way to include an albedo map. As far as I know, and this knowledge is based on an hour of reading documents and trying the shaders myself, this shader doesn't have any input. I wonder if I can nest it into a shader group and just use it's refractive and dispersive attributes.

Anyways, pictures. Really basic setup. Displacement map in the shader group works like a charm.

  

Kind regards,

Pim

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