California Tiny Home

A friend designed a tiny home conversion for an old semi-trailer in SketchUp. His original work was quite good, making my job of converting it to Cinema4D and rendering with Corona Render a lot easier.

I made the Cover!

I was asked to provide a graphic for the cover of the GeneStudio S5 owner’s manual.

Thedude Gets Wired, Squared

One of my renders made the Wired Magazine web site in an article titled “Fast, Precise Cancer Care is Coming to a Hospital Near You“. Nice! (Also, our amazing technology totally rocks!) That’s not the only cool place my work appeared recently. Here’s another:

Our Fastest Sequencer Ever!

A fun project for this special day. From the e-mail sent to the whole company: Finished with subtle touches from the impenetrable genius of industrial design guru Jim Pire, the new system’s speed will leave the competition in the dust. Have I ever told you how much I love my job?

Jack

I am so happy to have Jack as a friend and neighbor. And not just because he was kind enough to sit for me today. It’s also because he possesses many things I covet, none less than his cool and inspiring workspace filled with tools and toys. I feel my creativity jump whenever I set…

Some Vials and a Box

I often do not know exactly what I’m rendering. I just try to make things look good. Unfortunately, our products will never look like this on our web site. Our “real” real product shots are required to have a pure white background and a reflective white foreground à la outdated Apple ads, but this is…

Arm Chair Nature Photography

I put my recently purchased 15 foot USB cable to work this morning. I set up this simple rig and connected the cable to my iMac, launched a tethered session in Lightroom and went back to my work. Then whenever I heard the high-pitched squeak of a hungry hummer, without even looking out the window,…

Kelly Likes This One Best

She thinks this is my most natural smile, and I agree, but I thought the glass of Ketel One might be a bit too much for my about.me page, so I chose a shot with a camera – naturally! Many, many thanks to the awesome Steve Fossum for the fantastic shots. I did not think…

It’s a Gas

I spotted this outside of our office yesterday, and thought it’d make a “cool” shot.

After Hours in the Virtual Lab

While working on a visualization for a new lab space, out of curiosity, I decided to render the scene after dark, and was quite surprised by the results. The dramatic light provided almost entirely by a single omni-directional shadow-casting light somehow makes the scene look more real than it does with the lights on. It…

xfinity Logo Design

You can learn a lot about the process of designing a logo by tracing one. The design appears to be based on the ubiquitous DIN typeface – so popular it has its own web site. Simple tweaks were made to every character but the “n”, and the dots were dropped. You can see the minor…

Practice Makes Perfect

I see so much on TV and in other media that was almost certainly created with Cinema4D. So, to practice, I copy it — with varying degrees of accuracy. To create this, I Googled a logo, downloaded and traced it in FreeHand (Yes, I’m old-school.) The resulting .AI file was merged, extruded and rendered in…

Latest Ad Mockup

As is often the case, I have almost no idea what this product is or what it does, but I think I understand what the ad represents – the fact that something which used to require a whole bunch of time, effort and money just got a lot more accessible and way cheaper.  

Fifteen Minutes of FLAME!

OK, here it is, more than twenty years after the devastating Oakland Hills Fire, and we’re still talking about it. Well, at least I’m still talking about it. This time I’m sharing my experience with the crew from yet another reality show — Deadliest Planet. Watch out! Here comes another urban fire video! It’s not…

thedude Meets The Man

I’m very lucky to be involved with the design and rendering of the 2012 Burning Man. I can’t show you the rest yet, but soon after this year’s Man burns, I’ll share more.

The Lobby With Lighter Colors

I’ve actually started a blog for my neighbors to gather opinions about possible color schemes for our remodel. Here’s another of several examples. After I rendered this one, I realized that there is a light leak from the right. The small amount of light leaking in from the blue sky accounts for the green tint…

An Exciting New Direction

After ten great years at Affymetrix, thedude is moving on to what will hopefully prove to be greener pastures.

Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland

My latest scanning project keeps turning up gems. I am so glad I shot this panorama of Wolstenholme Fjord — purportedly the only place on earth where three active glaciers join together. If I could have anticipated today’s technology, I might have made a much more detailed shot than this one – consisting of just…

The Golden State Turns Green

It’s Windows wallpaper season in California. And that’s no bull. For those who don’t know, most of California looks more like this most of the year. You may be interested in learning more about the the Window “Bliss” wallpaper.

Scanning — Again

Yes, Kelly found a stack of old negatives, and I’m back at it. These days, I basically have the scanner running whenever I’m at the computer. I load up the negative carrier, preview scan a bunch of images, and final scan the best ones. The process is time-consuming, but my new computer is fast enough…

More Smart Fun

The shots taken by the professional photographer were finally posted today. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure that he made the most of the terrific photo-op. In addition to some tighter shots, I would certainly have made at least a couple panoramic shots of the event and stitched them together. This would…

S.F. Smart Car Rally

I got up extra early today to take part in a record-breaking photo. I had the chance to appear with a large group of Smart Cars two-abreast winding all the way down the “crookedest street in America“. I was not going to miss this! The event turned out to be better than I had hoped…

I Will Work for Food

This photos-for-food-and-drinks deal we have with our friends at MoNO is working out very nicely for us. Yum!

D3 Saves the Night

I was asked at the very last moment to shoot a few pictures of the new restaurant for an upcoming issue of Bon Appétit. With the deadline literally hours away, I went downstairs to see what I could do. The funny thing is that I was apologizing for the photos all the while I was…