Simon Moir

2nd 3D World Article

2012-01-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

I've written another tutorial for 3D World magazine, I hope its useful.

Animated Text

2011-05-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

A short one, something a little different; here you can see three layers that were rendered and composited in Combustion to create a title sequence. Combustion is dead now though, time to find an alternative. Any suggestions?

3D World Article

2011-05-28T03:45:00.000-07:00

I've written a tutorial for 3d World Magazine, explaining this post in lots of detail.

3ds London

2011-03-03T03:07:00.000-08:00

Have you been to 3ds London yet?

Design By Many

2010-12-15T17:22:00.000-08:00

DesignByMany.com is a new site that's just been launched by David Fano, go and have a look! Here's my first youtube video, explaining this earlier post in a little more detail. You can collapse the model using a Mesher Compound Object. I used CamStudio to record it;

Griffintown, Montreal

2010-11-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

Civicarts have published quite a few projects on our website recently, so I'd like to post some here. These renderings are for a proposal in Griffintown, Montreal. The visualisation team worked up many hundreds of images for this project. Here are just a few I worked on. This is an early massing, with colours denoting use;

This version, a few weeks older, has windows (opacity mapped) and penthouse roofs, trees etc. This is fairly close to how the images were at the end of the project, changes after this were mainly architectural;

The following night shots were worked up at different stages of the project. There was a minimum of Photoshop work, so different views could be rendered;

Like this one, same scene, different view;

Another, later one. Spot the massing changes? There's a Circus in there now...

Visit the project page on the Civicarts website to see more images the team worked on.

Topiary

2010-11-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

A year and a half since the last post... I'll try harder. Here's an outline of how I create topiary. You can create new shapes by replacing the ChamferBox. I used Peter Guthrie's excellent leaf material. Use a Mesher Compound Object to bake the Particle Flow and turn the whole thing into a Vray Proxy for your library:

Borobay Lake Resort

2009-07-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

I've been working on some great projects recently, which I can't post yet... I'm going to make a bit more of an effort though, so here's something from a while ago. People are awful. Especially the ones you have to put in renders. I've never seen purple people in real life, so I don't use RPC. In this image the lady in the foreground is supposed to trick you into not looking too carfully at the axyz crowd. I really like 3D entourage because once it's in place you can quickly work up different views. The trees are done in Onyx (More on those in the next post) with the cherry blossom on the ground done with PF.

Island Gardens Miami

2009-01-26T16:56:00.000-08:00

This slideshow shows how I worked up an image for our Island Gardens marina project in Miami. You can see an alternate version here.

More Trees

2009-01-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

This is one of the four centres of the Madinat Al Hareer in Kuwait. The trees in the parks are positioned according to the Landscape AutoCAD plan, below, using the Clone & Align tool in Max. The trees along the roads are arrayed using the Spacing tool. The other trees are painted into position using G-Tools Planter. If you try the Particle Flow method, look at this thread for a script from Bobo which will speed up the process.

Bird's Nest

2008-07-16T11:56:00.001-07:00

Check out David Fano's great site, Design ReForm. There's a question on the Max forum about the Bird's Nest in Beijing; I'm not certain if mine is doing exactly the same thing(!) but it's a start.

1. (Blue) NURBS massing of skin.
2. SurfDeform (WSM) Modifier applied to (Green) Plane Object.
3. Go down the stack to adjust Plane Object to fit massing.
4. Plane Object used as template for (Blue) Spline pattern (this one tiles horizontally). Apply Normalize Spline Modifier to allow it bend. Apply Sweep Modifier.
5. Instance of the SurfDeform (WSM) Modifier applied to Spline pattern.
6. You can duplicate the Spline pattern and play around. Perhaps slide pattern around NURBS massing (U Percent), experiment with layering effects etc.

Particle Flow Island

2008-07-15T17:09:00.001-07:00

I made this as an example of how to distribute Vray Proxy trees using Particle Flow and some cool scripts. This PDF illustrates the main steps;
-Painting over a top-down render to create distribution maps for trees and bushes.
-Using Tuomas Jomppanen's script to replace each particle with a dummy object.
-Randomly dividing the dummy objects into named selection sets.
-Clone & Aligning various species of Vray Proxy Flora to each selection set.
-Randomly scaling / rotating them using Marc Florestant's script.
I demonstrated this a year ago at the London 3ds Max User Group so since then I've thought of various ways to streamline the proccess. I've also started to use GroundWiz which is great fun. Someone always says "great boats!"... We bought them.