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.

Before and After

I was approached about creating some graphics for an eddy current training class. It turns out that there are very few images depicting how eddy currents work, and those that do exist are just terrible.

I made the Cover!

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

Before and After

I saw this very poorly PhotoShopped image in one of our product brochures, and saw so many problems with it that I just HAD to do a better version.

Wedding Bands

After doing a simple rendering of a shiny piece of metal for a friend, I was inspired to try my hand at rendering some jewelry. For my first test, I decided to see what kind of results I could get modeling and rendering our wedding bands, designed by her school chum, the brilliant Scott Knutson….

I am often asked to place products into realistic settings

For this sample, I downloaded a generic image of a lab and used the Cinema4D Camera Matching tool to perfectly match the perspective of the image, cloned the instruments five times, rendered the instruments with their reflections and shadows along with an alpha (transparency) channel and placed them into the scene with PhotoShop.

More work in progress

This is a close look at an instrument under development by one of our teams at work.

Work in progress

Not EXACTLY what it looks like, but pretty cool, nonetheless.

Ion Chef

I took a little time this weekend to clean up a model I’ve had floating around for a couple years. Cinema4D’s ability to import SolidWorks files along with Corona Render made it easy to create this version of the instrument.

SeqStudio Logo Animation

I don’t do much work with motion, but this one turned out pretty nice. It was used for the launch of a new product. 100% Adobe After Effects with an amazing free plugin called Saber – https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2016/03/new-plug-in-saber-now-available-100-free/

Mission Bio Tapestri

Another fine rendering with Cinema4d and V-Ray. The newest instrument from Mission Bio. Actually, there’s a bit more to the workflow. The original customer-provided SolidWorks file was opened in KeyShot, exported as an .obj file and imported into Cinema4D where V-Ray lighting and materials were applied for output in V-Ray. The resulting layered image was…

OK, That was fun!

No matter how small the job, I always learn a ton of stuff when I work in 3D! (I guess this is why I love it so much.) This time I learned that it’s possible to get really excellent results with a high-res displacement map in Cinema4D. In fact, a displacement map seems to be…

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:

ION Inspector

Combining a bit of photography with 3D modeling and a PhotoShop pinch filter for this quick one. It kind of messes with my vision. That’s a good thing.

Civil War Amputation Saw

My wife thinks I’m losing it, but I decided to create this Civil War era saw after seeing it on this web site. It’s sort of in line with the antique syringe, and easy to model. I know I’m missing some detail where the blade connects to its brass holder, but the decidedly low-res image…

Antique Syringe

More practice using another excellent tutorial from Nikolaus Schatz. This is easily the cleanest 3D model I ever made. It stands up to very close inspection.

Nixie Tubes

I found an excellent tutorial on YouTube for this one. I have always loved the look of these things. I’ve been tempted on more than one occasion to purchase a Nixie tube clock, but really nice ones can be a bit extravagant. Despite the high cost, they are still very much in demand. If you…

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?

Happy New Year!

A little more fun with V-Ray and PhotoShop. Let’s toast to a wonderful 2017!

Merry Christmas

In case you’re wondering, I created thedude & Kelly action figures in Cinema4D and composited them into a photograph of our fake tree with PhotoShop.