I love cloud storage. Whether for personal or business use it's incredibly useful to be able to quickly sync files between computers, view images on a tablet or quickly send links to clients. With the falling prices of cloud storage from the big 4 cloud storage vendors (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box & Microsoft OneDrive) I thought I'd do a quick review of the services from the perspective of a professional digital artist. In a nutshell I want to see how fast I can upload/download, how easily I can send a link to the file/folder & what features are available that'd affect me. 

I'm nearsighted and have been since childhood. For my friends and co-workers who are also visually impaired you understand the frustration of shopping for glasses. I've never been able to shop for myself - trying on glasses means taking mine off (hello blurriness) which makes it nearly impossible to judge how they look myself. 

Enter a new app (new to me, though it's been out for 8 months) for iOS / Android from Glasses.com (you can search for it in the app store or visit their site)... I know this might sound spammy but as a digital artist, and someone interested in the innovative 3D technology I'm really impressed with what they've done. The app builds a 3D model of your face and allows you to try on glasses, seeing them on your face. The quality is amazing, the interface is fluid - it's the perfect implementation of new technology to solve an old problem of finding glasses. Good stuff - no more blurry glasses shopping for me...

One of the most fun parts of leading visualization is finding new ways to effectively communicate design. There's been a lot of activity in realtime 3d & augmented reality especially as mobile, gps enabled devices like iPads become more powerful. 

This week I was introduced to Urbasee Future and I'm blown away. I literally "built" one of our projects in our office parking lot and went on a field trip... To the future built environment. It's incredible, everything is 1:1 scale, you hold up the iPad and walk around and see what the project will be like. This experiential technology is the kind of thing I'm always looking for as we apply new tools that engage clients & visualize design.

 I'm a huge fan of timelapse videos - in fact, I could sit for hours watching Vimeo timelapse's. If you enjoy a good timelapse as much as I do - here's some of my favorites. Enjoy!

Now that Autodesk has officially released support for Python in the 3ds Max 2014 Extension release - what does that actually mean for the community of artists working with 3ds Max? If you're a "user" of scripts - it probably doesn't mean much right now but I think things will get interesting soon. If you're a "developer" of scripts - it's time to look at Python & our current tools to see where we could use it. I believe Python is going to change the 3ds Max landscape in a really positive way - let's look at some of them. 

If you need maps - a great resource is http://maps.stamen.com which presents interactive maps styled in totally different ways. My favorite is the "toner" style - check out the examples below

The following one-liner MAXScript from Grant Adam has saved a ton of time while working with RPManager in our Arch-Viz pipeline.

RPManXref.captureAllXrefPassesIfNotAlready true

Simple little line of MAXScript that is incredibly powerful. Let me explain...

If you have After Effects and use Multiprocessing to render - you might be getting slower renders than you'd expect. 

I've (finally) updated my reel with some of the exciting visualization projects I've worked on recently. Check it out!