Day and night studies

By changing the time of day, the mood of the room changes.

Everything here is modeled in Sketchup and rendered in Indigo Render. Items like chairs and tables were downloaded from Google 3D Warehouse.

Interior Spaces

With the right tools already installed in my home computer, I am now ready to do interior renderings. Modelling an interior space is like constructing a real home. The good part is that you do not have to be a really good handyman. You can make as much mistake as you want. To fix it, you just have to undo or delete it. I did 10 renderings for this and the client chose 3 for the poster. This was my first project.

It was fun working with the folks at UrbanGreenLiving. Since this is the first time I'm into this business, it's like Building Reality before it's Real 101.

All the interior space including the Scavolini kitchen were all modeled in Sketchup. All other typical items like fruits, faucets, stove, fridge, table, chairs & bamboo plants were downloaded from the Google 3D warehouse and Archibase.net. All the scenes are rendered in Indigo Render.

Using trueSpace and Sketchup

These two free software packages are great. But they have some limitations. Some of the useful features like exporting to another format or rendering are disabled. You still have to buy the Pro version or buy a plug-in that can do the rendering.

Anyway, buying them is not really that painful since they are 95% cheaper than AutoCAD, 3DsMax, Maya and XSI.

trueSpace and Sketchup

I thought Blender was the only free 3d modelling/animation software. There are more. From 1999 up to last month, I never tried typing in 'free' when searching for a 3d modelling software. I thought nobody would just give away their precious work away.

I downloaded and installed these two softwares, trueSpace http://www.caligari.com/ and Sketchup http://sketchup.google.com/ . How these two became free? Well, just google it!

Fluid simulations using Blender 2.46

Another item that interested me is fluid simulation. What I am trying to do is to do a scene where water is flowing from the spillway or powerhouse of the dam to the river downstream. I was looking for a software that can model fluid flow. Most of the popular 3D modelling and animation packages I looked at like 3DsMax, Maya and Softimage XSI do not have this built in feature. You still have to buy a plug-in called RealFlow from Next Limit Technologies. Each of these software packages cost between $5k to $10k without the plug-in for fluid simulation. To buy one of these to just be able to do the scene is not practical. The company I'm working in is into engineering design and consulting and not with the film industry.

I kept on Googling until I came across Blender http://www.blender.org/ . Not only is the software capable of fluid simulation but it is actually free. Before Blender all the modelling and rendering is done at the office. Now I can do it at home. Blender is 3D modelling, rendering and animation for the masses!

The first scene I did was a drop of grey colored liqid falling inside an invisible box.

The next one I did was this liquid flowing through an opening to an invisible pool.

Tsunami test animation.