Saturday, January 24, 2009

A Portfolio Review

A review of various CGI renders and "PhotoShopping", in case anybody visiting wants to get an idea of how diversely I can apply such skills. I would think that the selection is entertaining enough without being too gaudy or odd.

Edit--
Oh yeah, try not to notice the clipping of images too much. I tried scaling down the cross-linked images enough already, and the blogger CMS still leaves a few rough edges. So there are some things to be desired with the presentation, but I need to get on with doing some other things.





I have this sort of love/hate relationship with 3D rendering. I love it because I can make things that look almost real, and I can make and have stuff in a virtual world that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. I hate it because my computer isn't the newest thing, and trying to do some things requires processing power and ties up my computer such that I can't be doing those other things. Some renders take hours, and I'm not at a point where I can build a render-farm just yet.

I just noticed an "oops!" on my biplane above. (Did you notice it?) But since this isn't any commercial project and took some hours to render already, I'll let it go this time. If it was for something more important, I'd re-do or take a money hit on a deadline snafu to make up for it.


Ahh... Good ol' PhotoShop. There's a reason why it's an industry standard. And this is done with an older version. Either 7 or CS, nothing newer than either of those. Anything CS or later is pretty much icing on the cake. Still it makes me wonder why they'd call something stripped down to less than 7 "Essentials". They should just release 7 or the oldest CS under that name, and it would be groovy. Want the extras and toys? Then get the pro version. Still it's neat that I can make my car resemble a micro-machine toy in under an hour or so.

And here's my shopping cart 3D model. Perhaps it's not the most impressive thing to some folks. But guess what, this particular model has actually made me some money. Not huge, "OMG it's a business venture success!" kind of money. But rather, I can get a tank of gas or a pizza every now and then kind of money. It still wouldn't come close to covering rent or anything like that. And the price on it isn't at some ridiculous TurboSquid trumped up value. Nope. It's a reasonable $5.50 or so. Around the price of a typical meal at Burger King. And if you want to download it for that modest sum, it's over at Renderosity.com.

2 comments:

Nigga Minaj said...

Aren't the prices at TurboSquid set by the vendors?

pauljs75 said...

That may be true, but a lot of times you'll see stuff that is ridiculously priced for what it is. For some examples, see cgcontentwatch.blogspot.com or the site that replaces it (designfail.org). Yes, it's true that even there you can find a lot of good stuff for resonable prices. But when there are glaring outliers due to lacking content moderation, it's hard not to say something about it. I believe one should get good value for their money on digital content. The cost for replication is negligable, and if the price is more than fair - there should be no need or excuse to infringe upon it.