It's cold in Los Angeles.

Anyhow, this kitchen set is a little challenging in that there is a lot of white material on the cabinets and walls in a very tight space. I'm still in the process of getting everything right, but there's a balancing act between using too little light, which causes the white materials to gray, or using too much light, which blows out the whites. There are a bunch of different techniques you can use to get around these challenges, including increasing the specular width on white materials and turning on photometric lighting. You can also place a plane in front of all the windows on the set and add a material with only "transparency" checked. Within this material, go to "illumination" and check "GI Portal." Once this plane, or planes, are fitted to the windows, it will keep light coming from outside the set from getting too hot and blowing things out. Although sometimes I like blowing things out.

When I rendered this kitchen, I preferred to keep the ceiling and all of the walls in place (as opposed to removing one or two and letting the light come through). The reason why I like to keep everything in place in this particular set is the stainless steel and other reflective materials on the oven, refrigerator and pots and pans, which reflect the environment around the objects. So what to do? I could have used a wide angle lens on the camera to compose the shot, but that distorts the objects, which I didn't want. I ended up applying a composition tag on whatever wall (or side of the set) I wanted to remove, with "seen by camera" unchecked. By placing all of the objects on a particular  set wall in a null, adding a composition tag (with "seen by camera" unchecked) to the null, and right clicking the composition tag, a window appears. Within the widow click "copy tag to children." This prevents the Cinema 4D renderer from rendering the wall and its children, but includes all the good stuff, like reflections. 

Google "Cinema 4D" and "architecture" for YouTube tutorials and more info. I did.

A first pass at a kitchen redo, with an emphasis on the cabinets. It's modeled, rendered and everything'd with Cinema 4D. Now if there was only some food on those shiny counters. Like...like...pizza. With a thick crust and gooey cheese. Mmmm.

Chris Schmidt from Greyscalegorilla does a great job sifting through all the new toys in Cinema 4D Release 20, coming in September 2018. Take a lookie here.

Image via MAXON Computer GmbH.

The first stages of modeling a fully-rigged human character. Okay, it's a robot, but still. It's some sort of vintage automaton that's traveled the world on passenger ships, only it went with the baggage. Maybe it did construction work in Europe in the 1920s. One of the fun things about modeling is coming up with a backstory for why the model looks the way it does. So far, this piece was created using mostly primitives, but I may need splines and extrusions for the second half. The metal textures and suitcase stickers were fashioned using existing photographs, which are tricky to get right and still need tweaking. I used an existing 3D model of a human skeleton to get the proportions correct. Now on to the hands.

Here's a video we created for the new recruiting firm head-huntress.com:

I created this video to explain, in one minute, what the Senate tax plan will do to Obamacare.

A color test using Mograph and a random effector, a multi-shader material on the squares, and a reflective floor surface.

The cool folks at Digital Media Artists of Orange County are having a meet-up on November 7th at 6:00 pm at the Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo. Marty Kane will be on hand to discuss plug-in alternatives for Cinema 4D. It's a much smaller group than DMALA and is highly recommended. You can RSVP through www.meetup.com/digitalmediaartists/events/244061929/meetup.com. 

What began as a simple extrude test took on a life of its own; an amalgam of Syd Mead and Saint-Saens. I'll be adding more chapters in the future.