"A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that rotates while in contact with both the surface of the Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud ." source In this short exercise, we finally got around to create a tornado effect, inspired by the images we saw by my friend and photographer Camille Seaman's series on storm chasing - The Big Cloud. Color and feel is based off from the image below taken by Reed Timmer. A tornado in Ellis County, Oklahoma on 4 May 2007 (Credit: Reed Timm

We took on a very fun project a while back creating characters for a game and toy IP. Here are some of the design images showing the process from concept to render. For the toys, special attention had to be paid to the articulated joints especially when the design called for limbs and weapons swapping. Here are a couple of our favorite characters from the lot- Gorillaice Above: GorillaIce - Concept | Shader Test | Rig An earlier iteration of GorillaIce rendered in color. Karm

To quickly visualize an environment, try converting a still 2D concept into a 360 panoramic image or video and then previewing it using YouTube or Facebook. The one thing that the artist needs to look out for is the warp and stretch distortions when painting in the equi-rectangular format. If one can adjust to this challenge, this method is a good way for the artist and the developer to get a sense of the space and the layout of an environment. We rendered the video footage f

In this exercise, we wanted to efficiently create a quick 360 previz movie with good visuals without having to resort to an offline renderer such as Vray or Arnold (either of which could have required a greater amount of time to achieve rendering results) Output image sequence uploaded to YouTube and converted as 360 video. This Youtube 360 playblast was rendered through hardware 2.0, without any offline rendering. This freed up render nodes from having to use a slower softwa