Quote

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
— Neil Gaiman

Something you’ve never seen before

Light travels at 299 792 458 m/s. Imagine a lamp that emits light at 1 m/s. What would that look like? Here’s a siren in fog:

This is Blender, and it's sore easy to do. (I'll make a video some day.) I figured it out while looking for effects I've never seen before.

I was just poking around the interface, dragging sliders past their limits. This is how I find new effects.

To try out the effect, copy this node setup to a point light:

Where is 3D art going? We made cartoons in 3D, and then we conquered photorealism. For me, the next step is exploring the unseen, things that are impossible anywhere else.

Some visuals I'm playing with:

• Fire that absorbs light

• Folded cameras

• Multi-frame motion blur

• World-space time offset

• Volume textures

• Liquid light

• 360° laser lamps

• Reverse perspective

Just as I was figuring out reverse perspective, Stuff Made Here made a real-life camera that shoots reverse perspective. It's incredible.

I want to know what you come up with! Reply to this email and show me your crazy concepts. With your permission, I might include them in a future newsletter.

Inspiration

Ordinary Folk is a motion design agency. I always recommend learning from other disciplines, and 2D motion design is one of my favorites.

www.ordinaryfolk.co/

They have a very particular style, and that characteristic morphing and extreme perspective of 2D animation.

I love the motion in this piece about the Bible.

Pro tutorial

This is not a link to a tutorial.

It links to a commercial by Man vs. Machine, one of my favorite 3D studios.

It’s great, yes, and worth a watch, (all their stuff is,) but here comes the “tutorial.” Scroll down the page, past the still frames, to the heading “Design Development.“

Here, they show you the shots that didn’t make it into the final video.

You get to see their R&D process, how they think.

They do this for most projects. It is a gold mine.

It reminds me of how much work lies behind fantastic videos. They threw away a dozen shots for each one that made it into the final.

A thing I've learned

Pay attention to the shape of your shadows.

It’s a shift in attention that I find can really help refine lighting.

When you’re in this mindset, try to balance light and dark, and give them both a nice shape.

I learned this from an art class. Painters call it “Chiaroscuro.“

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