http://www.cglounge.com/

Please update your bookmarks, and RSS subscriptions to the new site.

Cheers!

Having seen some popularity in the number of downloads with my previous chairs I decided to continue some more with this concept. As I already had a bunch of chairs modeled since previous projects I’d done I followed up with another classic chair. This time I went for the Barcelona Chair from 1929 originally designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This chair is also considered an icon of modernism, whose design is inspired by the campaign and folding chairs of ancient times.

I had modeled this chair without references but from the top of my head so it’s not completely true to the original, but I found my version to look good enough to work as a Barcelona Chair render and I completed it by adding an Ottoman to the mix as well. I submitted this one to my portfolio around March 2008 and it has been quite popular as well in the amount of downloads I’ve got since then. I also completed it by making a series with a few different colors and angles:

Also to experiment a bit I made a version on black background with a reflection instead of a shadow.

This version has been nowhere close in popularity as it’s counterparts on white background. I find that a bit boring, but I can understand why. I still personally like isolated objects on black, so I will continue experimenting with that concept anyway, despite it’s lack of popularity so far.

As the series with a Barcelona Chair and an Ottoman had been doing pretty well, I made another series with just a Barcelona Chair in a few different colors and angles. They are still pretty new, so I don’t know yet if they will do well or not.

Anyway, this is the other series of six different renders of just the chair:

And with these recent six images (early 2009) of the Barcelona Chair I consider the series pretty much complete, and won’t touch this subject again unless I come up with some more imaginary ideas using this chair.

That’s it for today, I’ll continue ramble in this series of post shortly.

Cheers for now!

It took almost exactly a year since I got my video account approved until my first download. But this batch of videos have only been online for a week or so, so I am pretty pleased in that way. And to top it of, I had an additional download just about an hour later. So a total of 2 video downloads now.

Gotta start somewhere, but the video downloads today kinda got my juices flowing, sort of a mental proof of concept in my mind for stock video, so I’ll definately invest some more time in creating videos more regularly from now on.

I am really excited to see my new silver badge next to my name at iStockphoto. It has been  a long ride getting here, to reach the 2500 downloads needed to get upgraded to silver. The pace has been speeding up recently though, so now I can start feeling that even the gold badge will be within reach before the end of 2009 if I keep it up.

This image of an olive green Barcelona Chair with an Ottoman was the image that tipped me over to the next level – the 2500th download that turned my badge from bronze to silver.

Oh well, only 7500 downloads left to gold. ;)

This was actually an animation sequence that where created back in the days when I ran my own CG Studio for our showreel. I thought it was no use to let it die on my disk never to be used again, so I revisited the old LightWave scene files, updated the textures and remodeled a few of the objects so it would hold up to be rendered again, but this time in a HD 1080p resolution (it was originally designed to work with SD PAL).

Okay, now I have a total of 7 videos online, I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t sell at least one video now. :)

I also prepared a Science Fiction video Lightbox. It only contains these three clips at the moment, but I have a couple of more Science Fiction releated videos planned, so I’ll fill it with additional clips soon.

After having tried some new concepts I decided to return to retro chairs and model another favorite of mine. The Bubble Chair. This industrial design classic sits right next to the Ball Chair in my book. This modernist or even spaceage design which to me is another great icon from the 1960 era was also originally designed by Eero Aarnio.

The Bubble Chair got it’s name from its floating bubble-like sensation, and is a great symbol to use for the 1960’s.

I was pretty pleased with how my Bubble Chair renders turned out. I decided to render them in a really clean studio environment with highly pronounced reflections in the acrylic plastics, so I ended up making a complete series in red and silver colors, alternating between black and white backgrounds as well as taking shots from different angles.

And here is the rest of my Bubble Chair series:

Some of these images have done pretty well, and some haven’t. The angle and choice of background color really seems to make a difference. White background is much more popular than black. Personally I think black look much better, but I guess white overall just works better in usage situations.

I’ll continue with my iStockphoto story tomorrow. Cheers!

Beginning the year of 2008 with my humble portfolio of three images I decide to try some new ideas for images to upload. I had recently modeled a creature for my own pleasure and also as an excuse to explore and learn the application ZBrush, so I decided to also use it for my iStock portfolio. I ended up making two renders of my Destrachan creature. Mainly the shadows that differs between them, I wasn’t that happy with my first render with the sharp shadow.

I’ve sold a few copies of each, but honestly, not really enough to make it worth it’s while if I had modeled him exclusively for an iStock submission. Now it was an object I had already made so it was okay, I might give this another shot, as maybe an image isolated on white isn’t the best way to go for this subject. I made some personal renders with him located in a dungeon, and perhaps that would work better as a stock image in this case. I might give it a try if I decide to return to this image again. It would be interesting to see if it works better like that though, as I kinda like modeling creatures.

Leaving the creatures behind, I made a much simpler image, a rendering of an old weathered bucket.

It was a model I had made for a competition some years earlier which I revisited and improved quite a bit to make it par with the current standards, I worked a lot with making the textures much nicer primarily. And this image has worked quite well as a stock image, I guess people like old, rusty things. I know I do.

Well, that wraps it up for today, I’ll continue on with the 2008 story shortly.

I have two favorite applications of mine, DeepMeta and iStockRoyalties, which I couldn’t live without – now when I’ve get accustomed to having them.

DeepMeta by Eazign is an application that let’s you manage your entire iStockphoto portfolio offline. I find this one really valuable as the portfolio grows larger. You can easily edit and update many images at one time from a convenient editor on your desktop instead of doing them on by one in your iStock account online. This is something that is really useful when you have additional information in your descriptions such as links to Lightboxes and/or similar images. That can be quite cumbersome to update in the online manager at iStock, but with DeepMeta it’s a breeze.

Other than the handy editor for your portfolio, it contains other useful utilities, like suggested keywords and categories, batch uploading and it also provides some different statistics tool. If you are the least serious about iStockphoto contribution you should definitely check this tool out.

iStockRoyalties from wavelength is an Excel based application which I find both fun and useful. It imports your statistics data from iStockphoto, analyzes it, and gives you tons of useful information based on this statistics.

The main functionality is that you can follow you history to see how you’ve been doing over the months and how your portfolio have progressed and how well everything goes. It also does predictions of how your future at iStockphoto might be, which is something I find really entertaining with this application. The predictions are based on how you’ve been doing so far and if you continue working in the same way as you’ve done. So it really helps to let you know if you need to work harder or not to reach your goals. And talking about goals, you can enter some of your goals into the application and it predicts on what dates you will reach those goals if you continue in the same way as you’ve been doing so far. And of course, as any decent statistics application it can show you all kinds of graphs of your progress on iStockphoto.

That wraps it up for this time, so if you have any plans of working as an iStockphoto contributor I suggest you take some time and check the tools above out. They are both free.

The Ball Chair is a favorite piece of furniture in my world. I actually love and adore most furniture designed from that era, but the Ball Chair is like a classic icon for me that represent everything of the retro futuristic feeling I’m such a fanboy of.

The Ball Chair was originally designed by the furniture designer Eero Aarnio in the 1960’s and is considered a classic of industrial design these days. And rightfully so in my opionion.

I had modeled a Ball Chair for my personal enjoyment in LightWave 3D, and decided I should submit a render of it to iStockphoto. This was my third addition to my stock portfolio at iStock.

I submitted my Ball Chair rendering to iStock around August of 2007 and got it approved a few days later, and it almost immediately took of in sales. From having sold an image now and then, I almost overnight started selling several images a day.

This made me see the possibilities in working with micro stock. Thanks to this submission I quickly got my first payout from iStock and with the increased volume of sales it didn’t take long until I reached the first magical limit of 250 sold images, so I could apply to be an exclusive iStockphoto contributor. Being exclusive and having reached the contributor bronze level I got better royalties per sold image as well.

With the popularity of this image I ended up submitting it rendered from two other angles as well.

This really did it for me, I realized that with understanding of what kind of images that works, one can actually make some decent income from micro stock. Now, that’s of course easier said than done, it takes both quite some volume of quality images in the portfolio as well as lot’s of trial and errors to find out and learn what kind of images that works. But now I felt I was on the right track anyway, and decided I wanted to pursue this and take it up a notch.

At this time I was engaged in other projects as well, so it was not until 2008 I started to seriously look into submitting more regularly and to start thinking of suitable subjects that can work. The three images (Dry Martini, Futuristic City, Ball Chair) was my entire portfolio until the end of 2007 and things had started doing quite well from a sales perspective in relation to the few images I had.

I’ll post about the 2008 progress and images in some coming posts.

I was working at a company as a flash developer in 2006, and a colleague of mine who was interested in photography talked about this site called iStockphoto and how he tried to get approved for a contributor account there. I vaguely thought that maybe I could do that as well, but submit my CG work as stock footage and I signed up for an account, but at that time, I didn’t have enough free time to take the next step and send in samples to get accepted as a contributor.

Then I more or less forgot about it and it took until March 2007 for me to return to the site and send in my three application sample images which led to that I got my contributor account at iStockphoto approved a few days later.

Not knowing much about stock images, I sent in my first image, which was a shot of a Dry Martini with some Olives in a blue-grey environment. That was sort of my test image to evaluate if there was any point in doing this, and see if anyone would buy it.

Months passed by and with a stock portfolio of this single image I didn’t sell one single copy. Looking back at it now, it was probably not a suitable stock image, which the lack of interest for it shows (it was not until January 2008, someone bought one license of this image, and til today, that’s still the only one I’ve sold of it.)

Anyway, in May 2007, I had to re-render an old image of mine for a print run. It was a Science Fiction image of a Futuristic City I had created a few years earlier. As I now had it rendered it in an extremely high resolution, I thought that well, even though I haven’t sold anything on iStock so far, it wouldn’t hurt to send this one in as well, as I anyway had it rendered out. Said and done, and it got accepted.

And about a month later I had my first iStock sale. Woohoo!

It was just a few dollars, but still, it proved to me that the site worked. And it has continued to sell copies now and then since (and it still does even today). Doing some calculations on the amount of sales and money earned I quickly realized that it would take forever before I even would reach the minimum payout amount. But you can’t judge something accurately with only two images, so as this one did sell, I decided I’d keep adding images now and then and see how things evolved.

The third image I added, changed it all for me and was an eye opener for the possibilites of working with micro stock. But I’ll save that story for my next post. This was a brief introduction of how I got my feet wet and got started in the Stock Photo world with my CG images.