Well you might not know this but me and a few buddies are starting up a record label called Narukami Records http://www.narukamirecords.com/ and I have been kindly asked to produce some artwork for them. Many props to Doug from over at http://www.bluntbeats.com/ for supplying the original design of the dragon for me to work with.
This picture uses a few cool rendering methods in it, such as ambient occlusion, soft shadowing and subsurf scattering. All of these methods used in conjunction create a really nice feel to the final render, but it does take ages for it to compute all the data.
www.kierantaylor.net/vids/fluid_sim_2.avi
This one took absoutly ages to bake and render, but by adding more polys to the fluid it seems to react more like a liquid than the previous attempt. I kept it much more simple this time by having no mesh for the fluid to collide to apart from the domain which acts like container.
www.kierantaylor.net/vids/fluid_sim_1.avi
Simulating water or some other liquid takes ages, total render time about 2 hours including simulation baking. Yeah, well, the scene is some random mesh that I made that interacts with a volume of fluid that is poured on it like a tap. The results are OK but I think that the fluid could have a bit more complexity by having more polys.
www.kierantaylor.net/vids/particle_stream.avi
This short is an experiment exploring the particle animation and physics systems in Blender 3d. It uses a randomised emitter mesh to spawn the particles at slightly varying velocities. No fancy lighting or shading was used in this example, that is still to come in future posts…
www.kierantaylor.net/vids/bone_rig_test.avi
Using a mesh that i had previously made, I had a shot at rigging it with bones so that I could animate it. The figure does a sort of walk, but I am on the right track. A bit more practice and i should be able to get the walk to look more realistic.
Also I have been doing some experimenting with UV unwrapping, texture skinning and ambient occlusion. I should have some really nice results to post up soon…
Not much to say on this picture, as it has been created by most of the same methods that I have used before. On the other hand I will be posting up more new images soon. In the future posts I will be dealing more with UV unwrapping, texture creation and skinning after a tad more practice.
The only real different thing about the mesh is that all the individual faces have been extruded a slight amount giving the whole thing a touch more complexity and detail. Even though it is nearly black, you can see the effect on the highlights and around the edges where the light rays hit.
www.kierantaylor.net/vids/build_test.avi
Alright people, here is an experimental animation using one of the images that I have previously created. It uses this function in blender called “build”, which when active, the current mesh is built up from the first poly to the last over a specified amount of frames.
Be warned I went a bit mad with the camera and it spins about a lot, so I accept no liability if your are motion sick everywhere 
This picture is still a work in progress, basically it is a mesh created out of duplicated bezier curves with a silvery reflective material added to it with a volumetric spotlight. My intention for this picture is to make it into some kind of landscape so that I can animate a camera flying around it showing all the details…
www.kierantaylor.net/vids/oblongs_video.avi
This animation was done using an older 3d still picture that I create a while ago, for reference, this is the post about the still http://kierantaylor.net/1024×768-cuboids-and-trapezoids-background.
In this one, again I used the keyframe animation system in blender to move the camera around the scene looking at the objects from different angles.
I made this image for my good mate Seizmic for his birthday. It started off using the Bezier curve tool to create a shape, then I extruded the back faces and added a bevel to the edges to give it more depth. I then made the Bezier curve into a mesh so that I then could perform more functions to it. After that the spin duplicate function was used and then a grab select to distort it further and make it a bit more abstract.
I used a blue material with light blue colour ramps and white specular highlighting ramps, transparency, reflection and alpha channels were also used to make it look like ice or glass. 4 light sources were added, 3 volumetric spotlights and one area light. The spotlights were placed behind the mesh so that you can see the light rays interacting with the object, and the area light was situated above the mesh so that it highlights the mesh even further picking out the details.
As usual because reflections were used, I had to encase the whole scene in a shedless cube so that the default colour does not show through. Finally I began to animate it, you can see the results in this post. http://kierantaylor.net/35-second-animation-exploring-camera-angles
Well you might not know this but me and a few buddies are starting up a record label called Narukami Records http://www.narukamirecords.com/ and I have been kindly asked to produce some artwork for them. Many props to Doug from over at http://www.bluntbeats.com/ for supplying the original design of the dragon for me to work with.
