Photographic light

It's incredible how CGI has evolved the last couple of years. Back in the old days (like.. yesterday) you needed a network of Sillicon Graphics workstations to render a crappy raytraced image in 36 hours. Now you can just do it in a couple of hours from scratch on your modest HP xw6200 workstation AND have the coolest effects like ambient occlusion, photographic exposure, lensglare and depth of field. Life can be so nice...
This is a detail of a larger render. It was rendered in a couple of layers in Mental Ray using 3ds Max and a bit of postproduction in photoshop.

Don't feed the models!

Giving away free french fries at a fashionshow is a cheesy way of getting publicity for your magazine.  It sure works though. And it resulted in this picture which I took at the previous edition of the Amsterdam International Fashion Week. The next edition is coming up soon! I'll have some mayonaise with those fries! 

Holland

Living in a completely flat country has an advantage when modelling complex urban development models. The A2 near maarssen was modelled in a couple of hours from scratch. When I rendered a testshot it came to me that this is a perfect iconic image of the Netherlands.

Pixel Love

I'll probably be moaning about missing the pixels in digital photography when I'm gray and old. Not that photographers of today complain about missing the grain of analog photography.. Not at all! These were made somewhere in 2004 at the HKU Festival (The endshow of the school of arts in Utrecht)

Sketches snapshot

Sketches snapshot

Stereogram

Stereograms are basically for 8 year old kids. to them it's magic. Some people still like to play with Lego when their older. Some People make stereograms in 3ds max even from their testrenders. This one was to test the photometric lights with the Mental Ray daylight system. Again the strange high values baffle me. Is it just because i'm a european using Metric values??

anyway to view the picture:

1. Pick a spot on the picture (the middle seems to work best) and just stare at it.
2. Allow your eyes to relax, don't just stare AT the image, try to stare THROUGH it. You'll notice your eyes will go slightly out of focus. This is normal.
3. Keep staring, don't give up, let the images slide across each other until they 'lock'. If the images are aligned try to focus.

4. if you don't succeed stop trying... you probably couldn't see those Magic eye pictures as well. Just go outside and beat up the first nerd you see. It's a conspiracy of us geeks to make you feel stupid! There never was a dolphin hidden somewhere between those dots!!

Droste

An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever, practically it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration exponentially reduces the picture's size.

More hugging please!

There definitely is a shortage of photographs of people hugging inanimate objects.  This was  one of the pictures I took for a paid assignment that didn't make the final selection. What a waste!!  (Note to self: more pictures of people hugging stuff.)

Sketches

My iPod touch gets used alot. Jailbreaking it was a lot of fun.
Sketches is my favourit app.

Ooops

I mainly render 3d-models which were modelled in Autocad, I use the file link manager in 3ds Max to keep the model updated . Sometimes the file link manager gets confused.. Mostly when the Autocad file has nested Xref's. This is the result.

Ringlight

I love the weird feeling a ringflash brings into a picture. But I didn't like it enough to buy one. Still I couldn't let it go. So I went to a hardwarestore and bought a circular TL-ligtht with all the stuff needed to make it workfor 50 euros. I don't use it that much but still, it is nice to play with from time to time. Look at the work of Jasper Zwartjes to see what you can do with it..

Festival Chairs

We used these cardboard chairs at the exhibiton we organised for our graduation at the Photo Academy Amsterdam. This advertisement was distributed with a dutch advertisement magazine 'Adformatie'

Shoot the gun

Just some pictures I found on the internet.

DOF

It took me a while to get some good result with depth of field using Mental Ray but i'm finally getting the hang of it. Still I think it's strange that my camera should have an f-stop value of 0,002 or something small like that to get some result. I think it must have something to do with me  using metric units (mm in my case) instead of inches. The renderings were made for a very good friend of mine named Roderik van der Weijden. I will post some exterior shots as well of this 'city in a building' he designed.

Mash my bitch up

Here is something I made for a popquiz in cafe 'De schutter' in Amsterdam.  Spot the popstars!

*Lotte van Schijndel*

Last Saturday I did a shoot with Lotte who studies Fashion at the Artez school of visual arts in Arnhem. Lotte helped me out while I still studied Photography so it seemed only fair to return the favour. I asked Marit to be the model because I always wanted to do another shoot with her. I just love the way she looks. It was also a kind of reunion because the makup again was done by Frances Krol who I met thanks to Marit. Check out Frances' site

Wraparound (Lume camera shader)

I'm a big fan of the Lume Wraparound camera shader. It allows you to take a 360 degrees panoramic picture from any camera placed in your scene. I will comment on what you can do with this and a nifty litlle photoshop plugin in future posts. For now here is a little testrender I did with a model of the apartment I live in. The 360 degrees rendering was done from a camera placed above the bed. I included a normal render of the scene...

Lost & found

I was browsing through the 'My documents' folder on my workcomputer and found these sketches I made for a shoot a while ago. I still like them. You can search for the results on my site: www.mathieuvanek.nl

Slitcam

I finally found some time to work on one of my projects that has been lying around for a couple of months. I was amazed how quickly I got the iSight webcam working in the first draft of a flash movie I made earlier. So now I programmed my own digital slitcam! It works great. The first results are very promising, I can't wait to do a fashionshoot with it!