Amazing Kuroshio sea aquarium video and music

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I’ve seen this amazing video just now on my diver friend’s blog and was blown away by the shear beauty of it all and wanted to share this here too.

This was shot at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan.

The main tank called the “Kuroshio Sea” holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters.  Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank. Read more →

How to enhance 3d renders with 2d elements

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When i first started out with architectural visualization i was very strict about doing it 3d all the way, but today almost every image i create incorporates some 2d techniques applied in post using software such as photoshop.

sometimes i add elements i didn’t have time to create in 3d or forgot about them. Other times i plan before hand on adding those elements and save time this way – especially if I’m not sure the client will approve them and this way i can just hide the layers. the technique I’ll describe in this post is especially useful and easy to apply in single focal point images.

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V-Ray RT goes Ballistic?

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V-Ray RT was released early of June this year and it is now fully integrated in my studio’s work-flow. this tool is remarkably helpful at setting up scene lighting and editing materials on the fly. although it doesn’t support all of V-Ray’s features (Displacement & Proxies for example) i started to think about how it could become a replacement for the standard render engine when it does. it seems Chaosgroup decided to take this even further as seen on this latest demo from SIGGRAPH 2009 posted by Jeff Mottle of CGarchitect.com.

V-Ray RT GPU rendering

It seems that the predictions some of us had a few years back about targeting GPU’s as the rendering hub are starting to take shape and are on the way into V-Ray RT. I don’t think this will become available any time soon, perhaps in one years time, but clearly this seems to be what everyone is aiming for.

In the past I was contemplating the use of game engines in our studio for real time solutions, but this latest demo shows one will be able to possibly use the V-Ray RT engine as a real time tool for production and possibly for actual display and recording of walk through sequances.

One other such tool I keep my eyes on is Randomcontrol’s Fryrender RT and their VirtualEditor.

A blog is born

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Welcome to my new blog, a personal addition to my web presence along side my studio website at www.polytown.com running since late 2005. I’ve been pondering doing this for a few months now and finally got around to actually do it. Many thanks to the great community built by Envato and specifically their ThemeForest Marketplace were i found the theme for this blog.

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