Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/ZR-OPtrj2FI/macbook-pro-13-inch-mid-2018-and-blackmagic-egpu-review

Portability or power? For decades, we’ve been wrestling with the same problem: portable computers can’t be powerful, and powerful computers can’t be portable. Well, the MacBook Pro (13-inch, mid 2018) is one attempt at squaring that circle: a small, light, slim computer for use on the road or in ‘third spaces’ such as coffee shops, which you can pair with an external graphics card (eGPU) to dramatically boost its power when you’re at your desk.

Best laptops for graphic design in 2018

And as you’ll discover as you read this review, the new MacBook Pro and Blackmagic eGPU broadly deliver on that promise: it’s okay to be excited about this, even though there are caveats.

First, to be clear, these are two separate new products from two different companies (even if Apple did collaborate with Blackmagic Design on the eGPU), and you can buy one without the other. We’re reviewing them together here, because we think the pairing is interesting and compelling.

Blackmagic eGPU review

The Blackmagic Design eGPU is engineered around a powerful Radeon Pro 580 graphics card

The 13-inch MacBook Pro, we’ll get to, but it’s worth starting with a quick bit of background on eGPUs in general. Historically, the graphics card inside your computer simply drove the display; it worked out what to show, and passed that to the monitor. 

The best 4K monitors for designers

Broadly, there are two types of graphics card: ‘discrete’, which are their own self-contained mini-computers, and tend to be both powerful and power-hungry (impacting battery life in laptops); and ‘integrated’, which draw less power (and so are better for battery life in laptops) but are less powerful.

You might quickly surmise, then, that a good solution would be to use an integrated graphics card on a laptop and plug in a discrete graphics card when you need more power. But while this has been possible on Windows for years, it was only with a recent update to macOS High Sierra that Apple supported it.

eGPUs are great, then, because since they’re not constrained by the same power and temperature restrictions as inside a laptop, they can be hulking great monsters. This can be inelegant, though; traditionally, you got an eGPU setup by buying an empty case, then buying a graphics card to fit inside it. Because the chassis doesn’t know what you’ll put in it, it has to default to the ‘worst-case scenario’ in terms of heat, power and size, which can lead to needless noise and power draw as it tries to vent.

The Blackmagic Design eGPU, by contrast, is engineered around a specific card, a powerful Radeon Pro 580, so it can be smaller, quieter and more elegantly engineered. There are downsides, though: the card is fixed, and can’t be upgraded; it’s basically the Mac vs PC argument writ small.

There’s one other major thing you need to know about eGPUs, too. While the operating system now supports it, this doesn’t mean apps can actually access its power. Currently, the state of support for eGPUs is messy and ad-hoc. More on this later, but let’s start on familiar ground with the MacBook Pro…

MacBook Pro 13-inch (2018) review

Apple’s laptop line had languished for longer than many were happy with, and while the older versions that don’t have the dynamic Touch Bar above the keyboard remain un-updated, both the 13- and 15-inch Touch Bar models are updated to be more powerful now. We’re focussing on the 13-inch here, but it’s worth saying that the 15-inch MacBook Pro (mid 2018) models get 6-core processors, a doubling of the max SSD size to 4TB, and, thanks to a switch to DDR4 RAM, a higher RAM ceiling of 32GB.  

With the 13-inch, though, we’re talking a 2.3GHz eighth-gen Intel Core i5 (with Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz), or a 2.7GHz eighth-gen Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz. We’re reviewing the latter; the £270 upgrade is worth it for creative pros. The base config is 8GB RAM, though our review model is maxed out to 16GB (£180+); 256GB SSD is standard, though ours has had a whopping £1,400 extra spent on it to take the capacity to its max of 2TB. Graphics card is a Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655, and this can’t be changed.

MacBook Pro 13-inch (2018): power

The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro Touch Bar models are more powerful now

Performance is generally very strong, even if you don’t make allowances for this being the ‘baby’ laptop. It’s responsive (in part thanks to the ridiculously fast, circa-3GB/sec SSD), and with eight virtual cores, it didn’t creak with anything we threw at it. 

Of course, where the performance trade-off is most obvious is with exports and renders, but even there, it actually has nothing to be ashamed of; a 4:10 4K project in Final Cut Pro with effects, colour grading, titles and more exported using the Apple Devices 4K preset in 4:44, a little over real time. 

It gets hot and noisy when under load, though, and, compared to the iMac Pro, its thermal recovery – how quickly the fans can die down after heat has been generated – is much poorer. This is part of that power/portability trade-off.

There are other improvements away from raw specs too. New to Apple’s laptop line is the T2 chip, its custom silicon controlling the system. This might sound esoteric, but it’s in part responsible for that SSD speed, and it dramatically improves the security of the system, with, for example, hardware-level encryption and tougher barriers to circumventing security policies.

MacBook Pro 2018: features

We also welcome True Tone to the Mac for the first time, a system that debuted on iOS for reading the ambient light around you and adjusting the display’s temperature to blend in. While this might strike you as the last thing creative pros working in colour-critical applications might want, note first that it can be turned off, and second that, actually, you probably don’t want to. 

Unless you have a proper process of regularly calibrating your display and creating/sharing profiles – and that’s part of a chain all the way from clients to output – then colour is always going to be a bit of a crapshoot. And honestly, allowing the display to blend with the ambient light temperature in your broader field of vision throughout the day instead of forcing it to stay fixed is likely to deliver an overall truer colour into your brain. 

Your mind does constant adjustments itself, analogous to True Tone in a way, and it’s probably wise to go with the flow. In short: True Tone looks natural, and you should try it. (It won’t affect external displays, except for the Apple Thunderbolt Display and LG UltraFine 4K and 5K Displays.)

The Touch Bar puts all the controls at your fingertips

Some folks hate the Touch Bar – a dynamic, long touch screen that replaces the function keys – and in particular the absence of a physical escape key, but try it before you swallow this received wisdom. Apps need to support it – most significant developers do, by now – but the constantly changing, context-sensitive way it puts controls at your fingertips can be, if you rewire your muscle memory, a significant productivity boost. The Touch ID button sits to the right, allowing for Apple Pay and unlocking – though if you have an Apple Watch and let it unlock the MacBook Pro, it’s done pretty much by the time the lid is open.

The keyboard has been tweaked. It’s still the ultra low-travel butterfly mechanism, which takes a little getting used to, but there’s now a thin membrane under each key. Officially, Apple tells us this is to make it quieter – it feels like it succeeded in that – but it’s as likely to be related to widespread reports of failures with the previous generation keyboard, thought to be caused by debris getting under the keys.

There are four USB-C-style Thunderbolt 3 ports, two on each side. And while you might take umbrage at having to dongle-up to do something as simple as plugging in a USB stick, they do offer some welcome flexibility (being able to plug power into either side, say), not least because unlike the previous generation MacBook Pro, all four ports are full speed.

MacBook Pro with Blackmagic ePU

Besides, one of the handy thing about the Blackmagic Design eGPU is that it doesn’t just house a graphics card – it also acts as a dock. There is one additional Thunderbolt 3 port (supporting the LG UltraFine 5K, and likely Apple’s upcoming display), an HDMI 2.0 port for UHD and 4K DCI at 60fps and four USB 3.1 port. 

The Blackmagic eGPU doesn’t just house a graphics card, it also acts as a dock

Plug it in, therefore, and you could be hooking up storage, peripherals, displays and more with one cable, and it also charges your MacBook Pro. The only significant omission is networking; it would be nice to have had a Gigabit or faster Ethernet jack there too. As it is, you’ll have to buy a USB to Ethernet adapter if you want a wired connection.

It’s big, too, though designed with some flair; it looks good on a desk, and though it makes an impact visually, there’s little aural impact. Even left running overnight at 80%-plus load, the fan was nothing more than a soft hum, and would be inaudible in a working studio. It also barely got warm; impressive.

But the eGPU computational boost is key, and it’s not a simple answer. While some power gains can come free, apps really have to be adapted to be able to tap into the full power of the eGPU, and in any case, a graphics card is only used for certain types of task, with the main CPU doing most of the grunt work. We need to remember, too, that though Thunderbolt 3 is fast, at 40Gb/sec, it’s slower than internal interconnects.

Faster framerate

One area where it’s easy to see gains is in the traditional job of GPUs: displaying stuff on a screen. If, for example, we run Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration at 1920×1200 on the internal display using the Iris Plus integrated graphics, we get a frame rate of 6.76fps on the Very High preset. 

These numbers are emblematic of the dramatic improvements an eGPU can add, say, for previewing VR content hooked up to the HDMI port.

If we plug a 1080p display into the HDMI port on the eGPU and use the same quality preset (albeit driving 10 per cent fewer pixels), this jumps to over 50fps. Indeed, if we turn everything to the maximum we can, we only drop a little below 47fps.

Few people will buy an eGPU just to run games – especially since this Tomb Raider title is one of the few that explicitly supports it – but these numbers are emblematic of the dramatic improvements an eGPU can add, say, for previewing VR content hooked up to the HDMI port. However, its more general effect on pro apps is harder to measure. 

Benchmarking

eGPUs on the Mac can accelerate apps that use Metal, OpenGL, and OpenCL, and we can get a sense of this using synthetic benchmarking apps such as LuxMark and Cinebench. For LuxMark, which tests OpenCL performance, rendering the LuxBall with the MacBook’s own internal GPU scored 2,693, and that score more than quintupled to 13,685 with the eGPU.

The gains were much less dramatic in Cinebench, which is measuring OpenGL. The internal GPU scored 33.7, and the external seemed to give different result depending on whether the window was on the internal display or a display connected to the HDMI port on the eGPU; 60.2 and 75.4 respectively.

Unigine’s benchmarking tool – especially useful for getting an idea of performance in VR authoring environments – gave 8.6fps (scoring 358) on the internal GPU/screen, rising dramatically to 35.1fps (1468 score) on an external display connected to the eGPU’s HDMI port.

Even when maxed out, the Blackmagic eGPU still runs Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration at just under 50fps

Going further, and trying to get genuine benchmarks for real world use in pro apps, it gets messier. You might think Apple’s flagship pro app, Final Cut Pro, would take good advantage. But even though we can see in Activity Monitor that both the internal and external Blackmagic eGPU are being used in exporting, albeit not at full capacity, the difference in our test export wasn’t dramatic; 4:38 versus 4:44 without the eGPU.

There is a little script that can force apps to use the eGPU even if they don’t officially support it, called set-eGPU; but it made no appreciable difference to the final FCP export time. These exports, though, were all running from clips that have been pre-rendered, and actually, we did see a speed-up in the time to generate these background render files in this scenario; 9:24 with the eGPU forced, down from 15:36 without it. 

It’s worth saying that, of course, this eGPU solution from Blackmagic works very well with its own colour grading, FX and editing tool, DaVinci Resolve. We weren’t able to test it, but Blackmagic claims speedups of 4× to 7× depending on task, and indeed you could likely boost any improvements further, since in theory you could connect up to three of these eGPUs to the MacBook Pro at once. Note, mind you, that they’re not supported at all in Boot Camp.

MacBook Pro and Blackmagic eGPU: verdict

Ultimately, we love this pairing, at least in theory. The Mac is decently powerful in its own right, and small, slim and light enough to get work done in awkward spaces; sometimes it’s not practical to work on a desktop, though that will still give you the absolutely best power possible if you need it. The addition of a meaty external graphics card is wonderful here, so long as the apps you’re using support it, but at the moment, that picture is just too fuzzy. 

If you’re thinking of buying, look at the bottlenecks in your workflow, and try to ascertain if they can be sped up with an eGPU. Talk to whoever makes the tools you rely on to find out their roadmaps before you commit, and remember that an eGPU on the Mac can accelerate apps that use Metal, OpenGL, and OpenCL. Badger folks till you get an answer, because the potential here is huge.

Also read: 8 must-have products for a smarter studio

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/VV1-42EoQ-E/

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On Switching from HEX & RGB to HSL

Learn all about the powerful color format HSL in this article by Sara Soueidan.

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Switch Font Color for Different Backgrounds with CSS

Fucando Corradini’s pure CSS solution to the problem of changing the text color according to the background.

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GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout

A great visual reference to all CSS Grid properties. By Chris Malven.

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Benjamin De Cock shares real-world examples and best practices on how to deliver efficient and enjoyable user experiences.

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Reuleaux Polygons

A great exploration of Reuleaux polygons: learn how to construct them, morph them and rotate them within a square. By Varun Vachhar.

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Create a 13 JavaScript game in 30 days with js13kGames

Read about this year’s js13Kgames challenge and how to participate.

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Robin Delaporte’s replication of a “fake” 3D effect using a depth map as seen on Epicurrence.

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Introducing Electron Fiddle

Felix Rieseberg introduces Electron Fiddle that lets you create and play with small Electron experiments.

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CSS Snake & Ladders

A multiplayer game developed only in HTML/CSS. By Alvaro Montoro.

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Vue CLI 3.0 is here!

Learn all about the third version of Vue CLI with all its new features.

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Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate.

Nathan Kontny shares the results of rebuilding pages in Google AMP.

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How I gained commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes

A very interesting article by Eric Holmes on how he could gain access to Homebrew’s GitHub repositories.

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SuperSlide.js

A flexible, smooth, GPU accelerated sliding menu for your next PWA.

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100 days of Motion Design

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Lindsay Grizzard’s high level guide for designers and developers on how to create and maintain a CSS system.

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Collective #441 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/8y6QdxCBUI0/theres-good-inside-methods-inspiring-new-brand-campaign

“there’s good inside” – Method’s Inspiring New Brand Campaign

abduzeedo
Aug 13, 2018

Today, Method Products, pbc – a pioneer in design-driven, people and planet-friendly home and personal care products – launches a new integrated brand campaign, “There’s Good Inside.” It spotlights the good inside its products, its people and its state-of-the-art, sustainable soap factory in Chicago. Brought to life with an uplifting, clean-centric cover anthem of the popular ‘90s earworm “I’m Gonna’ Be (500 Miles),” by The Proclaimers, the whimsical, smile-inducing campaign centers around the notion that most people don’t believe cleaning can be fun, creative or connected to their values. True to the brand’s disruptive nature, method® playfully disagree.

“When people think of method®, they often think of our beautiful designs and wonderful fragrances, but there’s so much more depth to the brand,” said Doug Piwinski, method®’s Global Chief Marketing Officer. “This campaign is meant to draw attention to the beauty of what’s inside our bottles–not only how our products are made and who makes them–but ultimately how we are connected to the homes and people who use and love method. We’re reminding everyone we can all be planet, people, and pet-friendly, and look good doing so.”

“There’s Good Inside” 2-minute video

 

Playing a starring role in the campaign and commercial are a handful of actual method employees, aka the Movers and Makers. The spot takes place inside method®’s factory  which is the first-ever LEED Platinum Certified manufacturing plant—affectionately known as the South Side Soapbox—and located on the south side of Chicago in the historic community of Pullman. The boldly colorful, delightfully sustainable factory provided the perfect setting to spotlight the brand’s iconic design, color and whimsy alongside industry-leading practices that exemplify what manufacturing and urban revitalization look like in the 21st century.

The method® brand’s two-minute anthem video features a harried father of twins thankful that method® is both stylish and sustainable; a chef who swoons over plant-derived ingredients and sweet-smelling soap; and a cat lady who appreciates putting the hurt on dirt without harming her furry friend. The spot culminates with some of method’s very own Chicago factory Movers and Makers dancing and singing a rousing chorus of “Scrub a dub, yeah!”

method® partnered with independent creative agency Mekanism and Mekanism’s in-house Social Media Agency Epic Signal to conceptualize and produce the content which includes the two-minute anthem video, a mix of connected TV and digital ads, social, influencer and experiential media. Directed by Chicago native Greg Brunkalla, the spot is designed to introduce method® to a larger audience than ever before. Social media activations will compel people to join the fun and creativity online using #mymethod.

“We built an idea that’s about doing good together. To show that “clean” doesn’t have to be all about elbow grease and sparkly white floor —it’s individual personalities, bold colors, vibrant factory workers, and a ‘90s track we all know and love,” said Mekanism Creative Director Laura Wimer. “Method’s “there’s good inside” campaign showcases how we clean isn’t just a reaction to a mess. There’s a way to it—whether we’re cleaning for loved ones, pets, a passion, or ourselves, we all aim to make the world a little bit better.”  

The campaign, while integrated across multiple channels, is method’s latest significant campaign driven to reach the people who love method®where they live and shop online. The ads will run from August 13th – through October in top US markets including Chicago, Washington D.C. and Denver. To view the campaign ads and learn more, visit www.methodhome.com/mymethod.

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Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/08/whats-new-for-designers-august-2018/

What’s old is new again; that’s the theme this month with new tools for designers with a few new tools that are rooted in the “old” concepts of design theory. From working with typefaces, to a color wheel, this roundup is packed with goodies. And then there are some new “new” tools as well, including a couple of cool 3D elements.

If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered!

Font Playground

Font Playground is a tool to help you experiment with variable fonts and even export front-end code. Variable fonts, which are single font files that behave like multiple fonts, are gaining popularity, making this something you should probably experiment with.

Color Wheel Generator

Color Wheel Generator provides color-perfect matches for all hues around the color wheel in HEX format. Adjust settings such as hue, angle, saturation and lightness to see perfect matches from every location on the wheel.

Scale

Scale is a tool to help you see a color scale for actual use. See tints of a color in steps so you know exactly what colors will look like.

Rockstar

Rockstar is a dynamically typed Turing-complete programming language. It is designed for creating computer programs that are also song lyrics, and is heavily influenced by the lyrical conventions of 1980s hard rock and power ballads. (So, it is a super-fun programming language to experiment with.)

Fondu

Fondu is a smart contract building tool. The open-source contract is designed for launching an initial coin offering or crowdfunding campaign. Fill out the questionnaire and download your contracts.

Font Memory Game

The Font Memory Game can help you train your eyes to notice details in typography and better identify different typefaces. (It’s harder than you think!)

Fusion.js

Fusion.js is now available for public use. The Uber project is described as “is a good choice for someone looking for an open source boilerplate to build a modern, non-trivial web app.” It is a MIT-licensed JavaScript framework that supports popular libraries like React and Redux, and comes with modern features like hot module reloading, data-aware server-side rendering, and bundle splitting support. It provides a flexible plugin based architecture.

StyleURL

StyleURL lets you export and share CSS changes directly from Chrome DevTools so you can use it with an existing workflow. It generates a link which loads CSS changes into existing webpages automatically so that you can share tweaks visually.

Keyframes

Keyframes is a new online hangout for animators. You can chat about and share projects, ask questions and use the community as a learning tool to up your animation game.

Brandcast Team Edition

Brandcast Team Edition makes it easy for teams to work on code-free website design projects together. The tool allows marketing teams to create completely custom websites and interactive sales and marketing collateral without a single line of code. The release allows everyone – from designers to copywriters – to work on projects together within the interface.

Pair & Compare

Pair & Compare lets you find and preview font pairs. Test Google fonts (and more) right on the screen and change settings to match your project needs — background, text width, font size, line height and more.

Emoji Tweeter

Emoji Tweeter lets you create tweets from a desktop computer complete with emojis. It’s basically an emoji keyboard.

3D Cube Form

3D Cube Form makes you say “that’s cool.” The form tool is interactive and starts with a color picker — engaging, right? Then the user enters details based on form fields. It’s fun and different; it might not work for every project, but is definitely worth your time.

3D Toggle

3D Toggle is a cool animation that changes how you think about toggle actions. You’ll want to click it into action.

Malvid

Malvid is a tool to help you develop components with an interactive user interface so that you can preview and document web components as you create them. The tool analyzes your folder structure to turn files into a visual UI and it works using an API or CLI tool.

Podmap

Podmap is a cool data visualization tool that maps the world’s podcasts so you can find something new to listen to near you. Search by geolocation, podcast name or filter by country.

CoolHue

CoolHue is a JSON-rendered gradients palette. It includes 60 gradient options so you can add a trendy color effects to projects with ease. You can also grab CoolHue palettes for Photoshop or Sketch.

Tutorial: Animated SVG Neon Light Effect

The Animated SVG Neon Light Effect tutorial allows you to take a cool custom effect that you create in Adobe Illustrator and then move it to Sketch and export a sleek SVG image that is lightning fast for websites and apps. The step-by-step guide shows you how to do everything from creating the nifty effect to applying it for use (no more heavy gifs!). Plus, the tutorial includes downloadable project files to get you moving through the project with ease.

Aunofa Serif

Aunofa Serif is a tall and distinct serif typeface for display. The free version includes only uppercase characters. The paid version includes a script option as well.

Calibre

Calibre is a super-condense font that’s a fun choice for display with just a few words. The x-height is incredibly high in this uppercase font. It also includes numbers and a few glyphs.

Cleon

Cleon is a round sans serif appropriate for a variety of uses. It includes upper- and lowercase letters, numerals and some punctuation.

Deansgate Condensed

Deansgate Condensed is a clear and distinctive typeface that resembles the type used on street name signs in Manchester. Distinct characters include a point Z and points on the M and W.

Facon

Facon is a trendy display font in a ragged style. The letterforms include distinctive cutouts. It is an uppercase font with numbers and some special characters.

Mercy

Mercy is a highly readable sans serif with interesting curves for some of the letters – note the “M” in the image. It comes with a limited character set – just 69 elements – but does include italics of each.

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/Y7zOuYEl0pY/build-a-complex-3d-sci-fi-scene

Creating an apocalyptic sci-fi city scene in 3D art is something artists might shy away from doing because of the vast complexity of the subject, 3D models and textures needed. But with smart ways to tackle it, it is certainly doable.

There are many different paths you can choose to achieve the final visualised image you have in mind. In this tutorial, I‘ll shed some light on the process I used to make this night-time scene. I try not to limit myself too much with a strict and predetermined workflow, or the software I use. My workflow may differ minimally to vastly depending on the project I’m working on. Software packages are just different tools that help you to get things done.

31 brilliant Blender tutorials

Most of my projects start with a concept sketching stage in 2D, but this time I started in 3D. If you’re interested in 3D concepting, I strongly recommend Jama Jurabaev‘s Intro to 3D Concept  Design course on Learn Squared.

Procedurally generating a city can vastly speed up the initial stage of finding a good concept, camera position and composition. You don‘t need to worry about getting the perspective of your 2D buildings right; in 3D you can simply reposition your camera and instantly have a completely different picture.

01. Look for references

Look beyond Google for reference images

As I already have a pretty good picture in mind of what I wanted to do – an apocalyptic, Independence Day-inspired scene – I start with hunting for reference. If all you want is reference pictures, Google is a good place to start, but if you intend to use those references in some way or another in your picture (textures, and so on), you should look for royalty-free images. Pixabay and Textures.com are a big help there.

02. Create the assets

Photoshop brushes allow for the buildings to be painted quickly

I use a procedural approach to model the buildings. The lower buildings are all displaced planes. I hand-paint a few displacement maps of single buildings with Photoshop and convert them into brushes. This method allows me to quickly ‘paint’ displacement maps for entire city blocks. These blocks can then be instanced to give the illusion of a highly detailed city. The higher buildings are roughly modelled with no attention to topology. We will add details later.

03. Add textures and shading

Blender randomly allocates the textures

The texturing and shading is done (partially) procedurally. I compile several pictures of cities to texture atlases. I then map, shade, alter and randomly distribute those textures with Blender’s powerful node system. For every diffuse map I plug in, the shader network automatically generates a specular- and bump-map. Not a single building is manually UV-unwrapped – all are box-mapped with some random shifting of the coordinates.

04. Streamline your lighting

Lighting is mapped in a similar way to the textures

I compile light texture atlases the same way I did the diffuse textures of the buildings. The mapping is also done the same way except blocking the textures on faces, which point upwards to avoid having lights on the roof. Distributing them randomly means they often don‘t match up perfectly to the diffuse textures. There is definitely a trade-off between being fast and flexible, and probably having to fix some things in post-production.

05. Shift and scale UVs

Displacement maps are modelled in real time

The base of the ship is a really simple model, which I then UV-unwrap, subdivide and displace with a displacement map I find in a Blender forum thread. The UVs are all rectangular and not rotated so the displacement follows the round form of the ship. With such a set up you can shift and scale the UVs to model the ship with displacement maps in real time. This is an extremely fast and intuitive way of doing greeble-like surfaces.

06. Experiment with building layouts

Different building layouts can be played with quickly

Now the fun part begins. This is where all the work comes together. First, bundle all the buildings into separate groups that feed particle systems. By doing this, you can change the random seed of a particle system and shuffle through randomly generated cities to find an arrangement that you like. This is the power of 3D concepting – you can generate several layouts in a really short amount of time.

07. Create lighting with HDR

HDRs produce true to life lighting quickly

The scene is lit entirely with a HDR image. There are numerous places on the internet that provide high-resolution HDRs these days. HDRs have two major advantages for 3D concepting; they render extremely fast and give you realistic lighting with a click of a button. I pick a few that I then import into Blender to quickly test out a few lighting scenarios. Cycles, Blender’s modern built-in viewport renderer, makes this a breeze.

08. Do render passes

Allow plenty of time for a beauty render

Beside doing a beauty render, I also render out several passes for compositing. These include, ID passes so I can quickly select individual buildings; Z-depth passes to simulate the atmosphere; Normal passes for eventual relighting; and, of course, several light passes. The beauty render needs around 20 minutes in 4K to be reasonably noise free. The additional passes are ready in a fraction of that time.

09. Create atmosphere 

Build the image up from the background to the foreground

With the already prepared and rendered passes, the compositing is really straight forward. I usually work from the background to the foreground. The sky sets the mood. With the Z-depth pass I‘m able to give the image a nice atmosphere. The light passes are then added on top and blended between them, depending on which light pass looks best on the buildings.

10. Add details

Fixing is easier than adding every single detail

Now comes the payback for not doing things properly before rendering. But most of the time fixing things in post is far less work than having to model every little detail and care about every pixel in the render. In this stage, I blend the spaceship with the clouds, add red lights on the roofs, add cranes, chimneys, antennas, the electric lightning below  the ship and the smoke between the buildings. And generally fix everything that wasn‘t perfect!

11. Finalise the scene

Recreate a camera lens to finish off the image

The final step is to replicate the effects of a real camera’s lens and film; to make the scene look as it would have looked if it had been shot in the real world. So, I slightly blur the scene, add bloom, lens distortion, a slight chromatic aberration, vignetting, film grain, and finally give it a cinema-like colour grading. I love this part. This is when everything you worked on blends together to form something real. It‘s like magic.

This article was originally published in 3D World magazine. Subscribe here.

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