Hello citizens of Earth,

I was looking over at the folks at GreyScaleGorilla who have made themselves a citykit for cinema4D which looks very tasty. No idea when I would actually need to create a city from scratch but needless to say, it would come in very handy should you ever need to use that plugin!

But listening to one of the commentaries about the kit, Nick Campbell said that they tried really hard to make sure that they were able to keep the poly count down but still keep a high level of detail. So I decided I would set myself a task to see if I could recreate a fairly low poly count city in a similar fashion to Nick’s citykit.

I chose Blender as my weapon of choice and armed with some very useful tutorials from Andrew Price at Blenderguru.com I learnt a lot about modelling, texturing and lighting.

First I made a few buildings I could see out of my office window


Then I started construction the city:


Added in some colour and texture to the place:


And finally scrapped most of it, remodelled a few more buildings and relit the scene (touched up in photo shop with some highlights and curves):

And this is the video experiment :

Overall I think it turned out alright, and I guess I will probably make the cross over to cinema 4D once I get the money, but in the meantime, I guess Blender will be my free weapon of choice. Mind you, it’s pretty mindblowing what a program like this can do….

Ok so I headed over to greyscalegorilla.com to learn some stuff in cinema 4d, and one thing he was talking about was ambient occlusion which to me is really baffling. But after watching his tutorial on the Spin logo, it got me thinking if I could do a similar rendering pass in Blender. This what I achieved so far:

Blender Render with Ambient Occlusion turned on

likewise this is the same render without ambient occlusion turned off:

Logo without ambient occlusion turned on

I’ll be posting more about this very soon!

Another example:

So I had the privilege of doing the Hillsong 2011 promo for next year and I have to say, it was a pretty tough project but in the end we finally got there.

Like all projects we generally start out by storyboarding or mood boarding our ideas. The marketing guys like to design mood boards, but here in TV land we generally storyboard our projects on the timeline. This year I recently saw inception and was very inspired by Hans Zimmer’s music I had to use it as a basis for the promo. Here was the basic concept with temporary titles and the inception music I originally pitched :

Hillsong Inception [concept pitch] from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

the hardest thing for me about this project was turning the very simple artwork into something that was visually compelling in the motion graphics form. Although in my opinion I probably deviated from the artwork a little too much, at least the promo conveys a sense of largeness and celebration which was all I needed to create.

You can see the artwork and style guide here (u can also register for the conference here!) :
http://hillsongconference.com/

After many weeks of ideas and style changes, the second hardest thing was finding a way to incorporate the triangle artwork in a way that seemed interesting and dynamic. As artwork it looks great, as motion graphics, it looks flat and lifeless (particularly with the end logo resolve). Here are few experiments of the logo resolves and some ways to incorporate the triangles into the scenes with the footage.

Here are some experiments:

Concept tests with triangles from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

Anyways after many versions of this ad, we finally settled on this one

Hillsong conference 2011 – celebrating 25 years from Hillsong Church on Vimeo.

Anyways, if it gets you to register, then I did my job…

in other news, Hillsong NYC launched last week. In case you missed it, here is a little sneak peak of the awesome beginnings of what will be an amazing impact in the heart of NYC [edited by the talented and good buddy of mine Paul Nevison]

HILLSONG NYC LAUNCH from Hillsong Television on Vimeo.

This is a tutorial I did for Hillsong conference. It’s my solution for doing 3D titles in After Effects. It’s a lot of render time, but the result isn’t too bad.

In Hindsight Jordan did point out that tutorial looks like I am teaching you how to make a 3D movie. umm.. this is not true. Sorry that I have misled you, I just thought 3D glasses looked cool

So this week I had contracted the infamous swine flu (or so I think, they didn’t actually test me per say, they just gave me the drugs and sent me home). That being said, I was confined to my house for the next 3 days which were boring as hell! So I had to occupy my time somehow. And this is what I came up with!

Now this bad boy was wholly created in after effects. There is no 3d per say, although of course, good ol Optimus here is created using 3d solids in after effects, so technically it is 3d, but no external 3d apps.  I am not the greatest animator, but I am going to get some 3d animation tests on here eventually and in the foreseable future, show you guys how I created this bad boy!

stay tuned!