A friend of mine runs a Sikh helpline which provides help and support for young Sikhs facing various problems. It’s a great service and a lot of young people have benefited from its anonymous support. My friend was producing a video promo to raise awareness of the main issues faced by people who call the support line and he wanted a higher resolution version of the logo and a logo animation ident that could be used on all video promos and marketing materials.

I have always wanted to join some sort of art or drawing class and finally got round to enrolling on an evening course two weeks ago. Here are some sketches I have produced. Some are pencil and paper and some I tried to use Photoshop to try and get used to the bamboo tablet. They are a bit rough as I am a total beginner but I didn’t realise how relaxing and enjoyable drawing could be.

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Real-time lighting and shadows are expensive in terms of processing power and speed.  In addition  it never looks as good as a pre-rendered image, which is the primary reason I have been  exploring baking lighting detail, from a pre-rendered image, onto a 3D model which can be used in a real-time engine.

The image on the left is a test scene rendered in 3dsMax with Vray whilst the image on the right is a baked version of the scene in the Unity3D engine.  I was exploring this as part of a solution for an interactive object viewer which I am in the process of developing, but more on that in a later post. This test is using the Unity3d lightmap shader with VrayDiffuseMap in the diffuse slot andVrayRawTotalLightingMap in the lightmap slot.

Application of real-time(Games) technologies in other fields besides entertainment has always interested me. When a friend of mine contacted me regarding a project seeking new ways to explore historic buildings,  I became  excited at the possibilities of try something new.

This is a new tutorial series aimed at beginner to Intermediate 3D users using Sketchup, 3D Studio Max. It will take you through the process of creating an Interior visual for a home improvement project for an existing living space. This is something that I did myself recently as I had my Kitchen and living room ripped out and rebuilt. The process of creating a 3D model and producing visuals allowed me to clearly

• Communicate my ideas to the builder and my family
• Test and evaluate different ideas and possibilities
• Reach a consensus on changes and reach a decision effectively and quickly
• Try out diferent interior designs

This article is based on my Masters thesis (M.Sc. Computer Aided Design and Construction) which explored the use of game engines within the architectural industry.

The key research proposition was to understand the extent to which architectural companies use games engines within their industry. The methodology by which the thesis was underpinned was an online questionnaire which was completed by architectural professionals of varying levels within the Midlands area of the UK. The primary aim of the online questionnaire was to understand the awareness of real-time technologies and the extent of its usage within the architectural industry.

I have been working on some ancient Indian temple environments for a new series of images I am working on. Architectural details on ancient structures can be really hard to get looking right as the result needs to be more organic and often more detailed. This is a result of many experiements on texture mapping and displacement.

A Constant point of development/angst for me has always been character creation since the beginning of the sarbloh warriors game concept. Getting back into it recently has been really interesting. Studying anatomy and using a more image reference based approach has led to an easier work-flow. Looked at a lot of Indian wrestlers and kabbaddi players to try and get away from the western  body-built type which is more stockier and less muscle definition.  Set about recreating the 17th century Khalsa soldier concept that I created for the original SW game. Since we are no longer restricted to old game technology I decided to bring the character into a next gen quality, which is what i always wanted it to be. This is not textured yet so is presented as a modeling concept only

heres another experiment with cloth simulation using wind to simulate a realistic Nishaan Sahib(Flag) animation. I experimented with the diferent values for the cloth to get something reasonably realistic and then i found that if i animated the wind gizmo there was more variation in the simulation. Click read more for the video.