The trailer for the Legend of the Guardian’s is out, a film that I worked on for best part of the past year.

Cool new video by Edouard Salier from Massive Attack’s new album, Heligoland. A nice write-up about the video is over at motionographer.

This article caught my eye over at iso50 talking about Alex Roman’s work on highly realistic architectural renderings. Earlier this year I saw some very similar work by Alessandro Prodan and was amazed at the quality of the work that is being produced by a single person with off-the-shelf software and technologies (3DS Max, Maya, mental ray, Vray, paint effects etc).

However, it is the lighting – as these images illustrate – that is nine-tenths of the law in creating a realistic render. The light in these images is glorious. And it’s the imperfections in that light that make these images. The light blooms in the sky, the highlights clip on the leaves and the lens creates chromatic aberrations and vignettes (must look in to those mental ray lens shaders…) which is what takes the images from ‘kind of nice’ CG to ‘amazing’ CG.

More work from Alex Roman can be found over at Third and Seventh.

A matte painting that I wanted to do this weekend entitled “Ghosts” as an homage to the 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell. This was developed as an animated/3D matte painting – the video which can be seen below, with more after the break.

Update #1: Sweet – Editor’s pick on CGHub.com.

While the final image and video took around a day to complete, I had previously sketched out some (very, very rough) ideas for the shot.

While I’ve posted about Florian Witzel before, I came across a post on notcot.org pointing to some of his making-of videos and thought that I’d put some up here. What I love about Florian’s work is that – for me – it is where mathematics, nature, 3D and design intersect. He makes very complicated things look very simple and beautiful.

The above video, Vestige, was a personal project that was later picked up for the SIGGRAPH 09 opening. More videos can be found at vimeo or his website.

Love this video to launch the new Rockband; The Beatles video game.

The world is a small place. Last year I discovered that there are two degrees of separation between me an Florian Witzel – a super smart CG guy who currently works as a technical director at the always cool New York firm, Psyop. I admire his work, which in some regards reminds me of Chris Cunningham’s work in its aesthetic, but much slicker and more refined. His portfolio has just been updated with a bunch of new clips as well as some interesting breakdowns of the construction of a few of the pieces.

These images are the reason why I saw very little of friends and family for the last four weeks. The 30 second spot for Rundle Mall (a retail district in Adelaide) was produced by the People’s Republic of Animation over four weeks of production, my roles being texture artist and compositor.

Video of the ad will be in the portfolio soon. In the meantime, if you’re a local, keep watching TV and you’ll be sure to catch it.