Our Weblog

Goal.com unveil their brand new logo

Announcements | Posted by Ali

Dec 13 2009

Goal.com's new logo

If you’ve not already seen it, make sure you give Goal.com a visit to see their brand new logo up on their website! The new article about the new logo is here.

It was great fun working with their creative team and of course we look forward to any such opportunities in the future too. Hope you guys like how it turned out in the end.

Make sure you check back here too since we’ve got a few tutorials in the works that should be ready soon.

I am grateful to Ali and Hussain for helping us express our passion for football and our desire to bring together our World’s many beautiful cultures. I also would like to thank everyone who entered the contest and all our visitors who make Goal.com the greatest football community on Earth.

- Gianluigi Longinotti-Buitoni, Goal.com CEO

4 Comments »

“Violence Against Women” Poster Competition

Announcements | Posted by Hussain

Dec 03 2009

Hey guys,

CAWTAR, which is an association for women issues and rights, recently held a Poster Competition with called “Violence Against Women”.

This was our submission:

We were Awarded third place, and congratulations to the other winners and thanks to the other participants for a good challenge.

See ya.

9 Comments »

Creating a Stationary Set in 3D Max

Tutorials | Posted by Hussain

Oct 12 2009

As promised before, and requested by some, here’s an overview and tutorial of how to set up your stationary materials in 3D Max, which is usually a good way to demonstrate your identity work to clients on different things such as business cards, notepads, letterheads and so on… This is what the final outcome would look like:

Stationary Set

So lets get started:

First of all create a plane, where you will be setting your stationary applications, make it as big as you want it won’t really matter, just make sure it’s not too small so the final render floor would look smooth.

Create 2 big lights using Vray plane lights, and set them just like in the picture above, the lights will be very big in proportion with the actual objects that we will be creating.

You can see how the size of the objects compared to the scene and lights, that’s just to give it enough space for when it renders and spread the light naturally all around out objects.

Talking about the objects: The making of each one of the stationary materials won’t be shown, but if you like that wont be a problem, but here are some things to keep in mind when creating such scenes:

Depending on how many objects you have, and what you will be showing in you scene, make sure that you arrange your objects on a circular form, with a center focus point in the middle. For example, the objects which are on the right should be facing inwards, or a certain point, and once that point is determined then all the other objects would follow that point. In the example shown at the very top, the focus point is some what towards the left side, yet we can see that the overall composition of the render is well organised.

I will outline the making of some of the objects:

Papers - Just normal planes with A4 or US Letter size dimensions.

Folder - 2 Planes with 1 of their edges aligned/attached to each other

Business Cards - Planes

CD - Created a donut shape using the line tools, and extruded it.

Notebook - The papers are just 1 big white box, and the cover can either be a thinner box, or a plane, depending on if its a hard cover or paperback.

Calendar - The cover is the same as the notebook, except for the calendar stand, a line was drawn, outlined, and extruded.

Spiral Binding - As for the binding its just a spring shape that goes over the side of the notebook or top of the calendar.

As you can see, most objects are just planes or boxes, which makes the models very simple, but the most important thing that will give the final render its beauty is your designs that will be placed as materials on the objects. Here’s a look at the materials we used for the stationary materials (make sure you save them as a .tif and at a 300 dpi to ensure good quality when rendering):

Here we can see the final composition, on our huge plane we created, with the 2 lights big lights that spread the area with lighting.

And another shot with the camera placement.

Hope you found this tutorial useful, please feel free to ask any questions, or if you feel like I might have skipped over some parts or missed any.

Enjoy and impress you clients!

21 Comments »

New ‘About us’ page, and other updates

Announcements | Posted by Ali

Sep 06 2009

The new 'About Us' page

Hi guys, It’s been a while since we posted an update in the blog. It was my turn to post something back in August, but unfortunately, these past few weeks have been a bit hectic; I’ve had to put on a number of different hats to combat a variety of issues which left little time to work on a blog post.

Server and power issues

There were several non-design-and-development hiccups late last month that led to me having to pull a few all-nighters.

First, there were the power outages; there were three in a row, with each lasting several hours. When the power would come back on, our Internet connection would go down. There’s really no solution for the power issue; it’s a fact of life in this part of the world, but we ended up investing in a UPS unit to mitigate damages to electrical equipment. The Internet issue turned out to be due to our network router being too outdated to deal with our recently upgraded 4MBPS ADSL line.

Next there was the issue of a buggy piece of code in a software that runs on our webserver that was spawning mysql processes in their hundreds while it blocked and waited for a locked table to get unlocked. It took a while to figure out how to permanently fix the defect as opposed to firehosing it. my.cnf underwent a modest makeover as cache sizes and max limits were upped.

There was also the issue of emails taking hours, sometimes even days, to get delivered. Thousands of emails, the overwhelming majority of which were spam, were getting stuck in the pipeline and simply being annoying little twits. Cleaning the qmail queue and reducing the defined ‘queuelifetime’ from 7 days to 2 sorted that out; it ultimately brought down the number of emails from over 5,000 to just under 300. If you’re interested in knowing exactly how all of the above was tackled, just let me know and I can go ahead and post further details.

The server has been doing a pretty decent job of handling the number of requests that it receives, and so I tend to cut it some slack whenever it decides to time out for a couple of hours and catch its breath. Though our relationship is laid back and we’ve had few fits during the past 7 years, it certainly isn’t a sustainable one in light of our aspirations to grow, nor is the constant “context-switching” that reminds me of my days as a generalist (shivers). The very near future will therefore almost certainly have to involve us getting a more powerful machine to house our webserver, hopefully with a dedicated system administrator to take care of it.

Goal.com updates

It’s been really great working with Goal.com during these past few weeks on tweaking their logo and making it ready for its final unveiling real soon. There’s another surprise too that will hopefully be revealed along with the logo once it goes live, so be sure to look out for it.

‘About Us’ page

We had been meaning to update the ‘About Us’ page for quite some time. Our new one goes nicely with the general theme of the website and thankfully, does away with the somewhat hideous icons that we were using before. The new page now also contains a list of some of the awards and honors that we’ve received over the years.

I finally got around to taking the issue of PNG transparency in IE6 seriously after ignoring it all my life because we now had a PNG that needed to be positioned on top of everything else, which meant that the issue could no longer be hand-waived. Thankfully, ifixpng proved to be a really easy solution that was much less hassle than the CSS workarounds that I had come across.

Some parts of the code still need cleaning up, but they’ll have to wait until tomorrow. For now, hope you like the new design. Please feel free to let us know if you have any comments.

Tags: about us
5 Comments »

Tutorial 4: Making a weaved pattern in 3D Max

Tutorials | Posted by Hussain

Aug 12 2009

In this tutorial I will be talking mainly about how I made the weaved pattern (wattle) for the sides of the chair in the scenes below. There were a few requests so I decided to write about it, I’ve tried to draw the general idea of how it was made, as a final render it might look complex, but breaking it apart you’ll find out that its mainly a repetitive pattern. So here it goes…

Living Room © Skyrill Design Studios

In this tutorial I won’t be going over making the same chair above, but will make use of the weaved pattern to create a side table, both to make it shorter on you and make something else.

Hope you find it useful, and please leave a comment with any questions or comments

*Please click on the thumbnails to view them in full size

————————————————————————————-

Step 1- Create a plane, and set the horizontal segments based on how many there will be in your object. The vertical will be for how wide each curve in each line will... Don't worry, it will clear up below.

Step 1- Create a plane, and set the horizontal segments based on how many rows of the pattern will be in your object. The vertical will be for how wide each curve in each line will... Don't worry, it will clear up below.

Step 2- Convert your plane to an 'Editable Poly'.

Step 3- Select all the vertices making up your vertical segments, selecting 1 column and skipping another, just like in the thumbnail.

Step 4- Drag these vertices to the front, depending on how much curve you want to give your shape.

Step 5- Choose one of the horizontal edges, and press 'Loop' and then 'Ring' form the right menu.

Step 5- Choose one of the horizontal edges, and press 'Loop' and then 'Ring' from the right menu.

Step 6- Choose create shape from outline from the right side. Make sure you choose 'smooth', this will allow the sharp corners we created earlier to smooth out. * Feel free to adjust the vertices we moved forward earlier, since you have a better view of how it will look smoothed out.

Step 7- Select your spline, and on the side, under 'Rendering', place a tick next to "Enable in Viewport", and choose the rectangular option. Depending on your units and scene size, choose a size that's reasonable, make sure that the gap that it creates between a line and another, can fit the same line, this will be important for the next step.

Step 8- Once you are satisfied with the width and height of your lines, select the object / spline as a whole, hold Shift + Drag up to duplicate the same set of lines in the gaps that you created. Make sure that the splines don't overlap one another and fit nicely. Now change your viewport, and drag these set of lines to the left/right, so that the curve would be facing the opposite way of the other set of lines curves. * I felt like the oval gap it created between my lines was a bit too much, so I selected both, and using the Scale Tool just adjusted it a bit.

Step 9- Remove the extra vertices that are created on the sides, making them both almost start and end at the same points.

Step 10- Create 2 Cylinders next to each other, you can scale them to make them more of oval shape, and make them fit into the gaps between the places the lines intersect, and Duplicate these 2 Cylinders across to the end to fill up all the gaps.

Step 10- Create 2 Cylinders next to each other, you can scale them to make them more of an oval shape, and make them fit into the gaps between the places the lines intersect, and duplicate these 2 Cylinders across to the end to fill up all the gaps.

Step 11- Using cylinders, create a frame for your 'Weaved Pattern' we created. Group everything you've made so far and call it "Side".

Step 12- Using the rotate tool, Hold Shift and Drag into a 90 degrees angle, repeat this step 3 more times to create a square shape, creating the 4 sides of your table. * You might need to open the new groups and remove some of their legs (cylinders) since they might overlap at some corners.

Step 13- Create a thin box at the top, this will be the glass.

Step 14- Select the top border of your 4 legs, and using the "Chamfer" tool, give it a "Chamfer Amount" of 3, and in the Modifier List, Apply the "Smooth" modifier, and check the "Auto Smooth" in its option panel. * You will need to convert the cylinders to an 'Editable Poly' in order to choose its top border like we did above.

Final- After applying material and lighting, the final model could look something like this

That’s how I did my last scene, but there’s also another way using Displacement Maps, which I’ll talk about in my next tutorial…

I hope you found this tutorial useful, if you have any questions, I’d be more then happy to answer them, just email me or drop it in the comment box.

Take care until next time!

Tags: 3d, 3d model, bamboo, pattern, vray, wattle, weave
15 Comments »

Street photography: sharing some experiences

Articles | Posted by Ali

Aug 01 2009

If you type ’street photography tips’ into Google, you’ll find lots of websites that provide lists on how to improve your street photography skills. I thought we could try something a bit different and instead put up some photos and talk about the circumstances in which they were taken and lessons that were learnt from those experiences.

Purists may dispute the classification of some of the photos below as street photography, particularly the close-ups. So if you’re a purist, lighten up =)

Also, the lessons mentioned below are based on personal experiences, so they may well not generalize to all cases and all photographic genres – you can just take them for what they’re worth.

1. Off-guard shots are sometimes more natural

I spotted two kids wearing AC Milan shirts and digging into their cups of ice cream at the entrance to a theme park. I asked their mother if it would be alright to take a few photos of them, and she said it was fine, so I proceeded to do so. I then thanked them all and just before leaving took a couple more shots while the kids were off-guard. Later at home, I noticed that those last couple of shots were the best of the lot since the facial expressions in them were much more natural. So even when going for shots where the subject is posing for you, take a few off-guard ones as well; they might end being your keepers.

2. Create a rapport with your subject

When taking pictures of people, it’s very important never to forget that your subjects are human beings as well. Creating a good rapport with them will ensure that the experience will be a positive one for both parties. Walking away with a good shot is of no use if the subject ends up being offended or saddened. For this photo, I was walking in an alley in Rome when I saw a lady sitting in a corner playing the accordion. I really wanted to take a photo of her, but wasn’t too comfortable with just taking some quick shots and walking away. So instead, I figured I would stand and listen to her playing. I ended up listening to her for close to 15 minutes, and was genuinely enjoying her tunes. She then looked at me, I smiled and it was at that moment that I took the above shot of her.

This photo has an interesting story as well. There was a kid sitting in a cardboard box eating some peanuts. It was a great scene. I took a couple of shots and the kid noticed me and immediately turned to his mother to tell her about the pesky photographer who was disturbing him. At that moment, I walked up to both of them and showed them what I had taken and the kid simply couldn’t be happier to see his face on the camera’s little LCD screen. So I then asked his mother if I could take a few more shots of her son and she tidied him up and told him to look at the camera. Perhaps I would have gotten a different reaction from the mother had she not seen her son’s jubilation prior to me asking whether or not it was ok to photograph him. It’s great when you can walk away with a nice photograph while also making sure that the other person feels good about the whole experience.

3. When someone doesn’t want to be photographed, don’t give up on them

The man whose hands are visible in this photo was the owner of a frankincense shop and had some really great facial features so I was adamant on photographing him. But he wasn’t up for it. Instead of just walking out, I asked if it would be ok to only frame his hands as they were sifting through his frankincense and he agreed. The photo came out pretty nice and perhaps even looks better than if the store owner’s entire upper body had been included in the frame. The lesson here is to persist (up to a point of course); don’t give up.

4. Whenever possible, go in for a shot when all the other photographers leave

This is one of my favorite photos. A group of girls were walking together as part of a larger parade and they had managed to grab the attention of all the photographers who were there on that day. As a result, many of the girls got distracted with the tens of cameras that were clicking around them from every angle and so they ceased to be serene, which was the theme of the whole parade. Instead of settling for the shots that I had taken, I decided to walk with the group for about 10 minutes until they were off the main road, which meant that there were fewer bystanders and photographers around; it was that moment that I took the above shot and got the facial expression that I was hoping to get.

5. Take lots of shots, especially if you shoot with digital

I wanted to photograph a demonstration that was going on, but unfortunately, the streets on which the demonstrators were walking through had been sealed off for security reasons. Bystanders could only watch from a distance. I was determined to get a few good shots of the event. Standing on the pavement, at a distance, with a telephoto lens and wanting to get clear shots of the demonstrators proved a difficult feat: most of the captures were ruined by distractions, which were making the whole exercise very challenging. The only option I had was to simply compose and fire the shutter like there was no tomorrow. The above was one of the strategy’s successful results. The more shots you take, the greater the likelihood that you’ll have keepers.

6. Diptychs can turn otherwise normal shots into interesting ones

Each of the above photos looks very normal on its own, but when placed next to each other, the whole thing becomes a lot more interesting. The photo was taken during the announcement in Trafalgar Square about whether or not London would win its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Having captured the same group of people right before and then right after the announcement resulted in a two-photo series that says a lot. Notice the difference in facial expressions and also (my favorite bit) the man in the lower left corner who has his fingers crossed in the first photo and is ecstatic in the second photo.

7. Shyness will always rob you of potentially great photos

Sometimes, I have to try extra hard to muster up the courage to ask someone if it’s ok to take their photo. I was walking in a vegetable market on one of my trips and was dying to take a photo of the mango seller shown above, but the general mood of the place didn’t seem to be one where I felt like I could easily ask him whether or not I could take his photo, let alone take one without asking him first. So I carried on walking.

On our way back, I spotted him once again and this time thought to myself that if I don’t give it a go, I would probably not get the chance to take this photo ever again. So I gestured to him with the camera and, what do you know, he was more than happy to look at the lens and smile.

8. Never delete a photo, even if you don’t like it on first sight

I didn’t really think much of this one when I took it a few years ago nor when I was going through the photos after the trip. It wasn’t one of those times when you take a shot and go “wow this one’s great, it’s going to make this whole trip worth it”. It was done very quickly on our way back to the hotel. Then a few months ago I was looking through my old photos and thanks to a friend’s advice who said that I should never delete anything, decided it could be brought back to life.

That’s it for now. Hopefully, these experiences have been useful. Look out for another photography-related article soon. Thanks.

Tags: photography experiences, photography tips, street photography
38 Comments »

Our Weblog

Goal.com unveil their brand new logo

“Violence Against Women” Poster Competition

Creating a Stationary Set in 3D Max

New ‘About us’ page, and other updates

Tutorial 4: Making a weaved pattern in 3D Max

Street photography: sharing some experiences

Archives

Categories

RSS Feed

Twitter

Recent Posts


	Home Portfolio Web Print Identity Photo About Us Contact Us Weblog


Home \| Weblog \| RSS \| Client Login Valid XHTML 1.0 \| © 2009 Skyrill Design Studios, Others