Showreel 2016

Finally, the new showreel is online.

Showreel – Manuel Albert from manuelalbertcom on Vimeo.

The new manuel-albert.com website is online

The new manuel-albert.com website is online, hosting new commercial projects images and videos. A service page and a fresh look.
But there’s more. A new logo was created, content structured and there’s still more to do:

• About and service page translation (german and english)
• More projects will be uploaded soon

Thanks for help to Frederik Niemann (who originally created this website) and my office colleagues from Büro Zentral.

Anvil & Hammer Odyssey

Not too long ago my brother approached me and asked if I’d be willing to make a wallpaper for him – and of course I was.
As mentioned in the related image post (here), one of his passions is forging (there are more) & he asked me for a wallpaper of an anvil with a piece of iron being hammered into shape. Sparks flying. That sort of image.

I asked him if he could provide me a sketch of what he had in mind and he gave me a quick pencil drawing of the anvil on the left (because of his PCs desktop icons). So I started off getting reference images (I actually didn’t really know what an anvil would have to look like) for the objects and started modelling. I knew that I had to get shaders and textures right, so I unwrapped the models and prepared texture maps in highresolution.

I really wanted to focus on the atmosphere. The glowing steaming hot iron in a somewhat darkish environment (of course a rather romantic imagination of modern forging – although the place my brother started was sort of dark and did use traditional old tools). So I used a blue orange color theme and rather dark tinted colors. I really enjoy setting up the lights and tweak them using Blender Cycles realtime preview.

A few particle hairs as sparks – done, I reckonned.
So I handed this picture over to my brother and he said it was OK but he had imagined something else. I had decided to change the position of the anvil (to the right) since I thought it would be better to cover up that no character is holding the tools. The sparks weren’t right either.

This is the first version:

Therefore I had to redo most parts of the image (at least all the objects where alright) and started changing the objects positions, lights and tweaked it a lot. Over and over again. There was one mistake I made and it took me a long time to find out what it was. I used Blenders color management tools and especially the looks – to emulate a films response curve. When I had saved the renders they looked completely different (I missed to notice the ‘save as render’ dialog). In the end I used a bit of post work like color correction, vignette and stuff like that to enhance the render. Didn’t have to use much since I had tweaked the image over and over again.

So here’s the final piece:

And a wireframe for the curios:

Ta-dah!

A new website.

I have never been what you’d call a skilled web-designer, so trying to design a website on my own has always been rather frustrating. Every time I would try to design something, I was either lacking great ideas or I didn’t know how to implement any of my smaller ideas code-wise. Even when I learned how to implement the smaller ideas, they still wouldn’t add up to a good overall concept.

Luckily, a dear friend of mine and former study mate is excellent at making websites. He is a brilliant designer in general and has a great eye for composition and style. Also, he is a really nice guy with a great sense of humor. So, thanks to Frederik from Weederbruuk, I can welcome you warmly to my new online portfolio. A few areas of the site are still in the works, and a few things are missing here and there content-wise – but rest assured that my appreciation for this website fuels my motivation to keep it up-to-date.

So welcome and I hope you’ll enjoy the website.

Manuel

ps: thanks to adri r. for looking through my texts 😉