Boat International Cover and Monaco Yacht Show

Monaco Yacht Show was on this week. In the build up to the event I have been extremely busy creating images for press and the exhibition. I am happy to say that a image made it as the cover image for Boat International for the October issue. There was also a six page spread in the magazine. You can see the article on the publication page. The show also marked the unveiling of three of the new yachts in the SuperSport series which receive a lot of attention.

I also took the opportunity to head up to the top of Monaco and get some HDRI Panorama shots. Although for the first attempt of the night shot I headed up without any battery. I have learnt my lesson to always check my equipment before I head off.

VW Camper Van

After seeing all the VW Campers in Brighton (see post here) the other week I decided to create this one. The Camper Van was modelled in 3ds Max and rendered in Mental Ray using the HDR lighting technique I described here in HDRI Reflections. I applied all the materials using a multi-sub object.

HDRI Reflections

This post is to describe how I got the reflections on the Vespa in a studio environment. I think you can just add a HDRI to the environment slot in the material editor. But I did it like this.

I created a sphere around the Vespa and applied the HDRI checking it was 2 sided and in the Self-Illumination slot. The Vespa is on a plane with an omni light with a multiplier of 0.01. When it came to rendering I added a Object ID pass and a separate object id to the bike, plane and sphere in the objects properties. The pass and render are below

Using the pass in Photoshop I masked out the background and added a gradient. I hope this all makes sense please feel free to add any comments and ask questions below.