Challenging Spirit

Last week, we updated our website with a new category: Challenging Spirits.
We are living in an exciting time of change, concerning photography and digital graphics.
The times when a photo-shooting was necessary to realize a visual work are seeing their end. Especially in economic unstable times, creators and their clients are looking for reasonable ways to realize their creative vision - and a mixture of 3D graphics and 2D retouching is the way to achieve this; no necessity for a cameraman, lighting assistant or even the object to be photographed.
In a constantly challenging spirit, JDI`s staff is trying out new techniques, improving it`s skill and creating interesting visuals to prove what we can do just with our brains, hands and machines.

The latest work is a practical approach to an object we are using everyday: a digital camera, presented in a commercial but not altogether conservative way.

There are many advantages to using a camera for visual challenge: it includes different kind of materials (coated plastic, metal, glass), is of relatively simple shape and has thus huge potential to project a huge variety of designs onto it.

I had the idea of a fragile, gorgeously designed digital camera that should stand in contrast with a rough background.
The whole scene was created and rendered in 3D - no photos were used except for the ground texture and the lens.

Our DI Creator Kaneya-san is a master in visually creating digital cameras in Photoshop. He used my 3D rendering as a base to create a perfect and detailed (virtual) studio lighting shot. Detail that is hard to output in a 3D render was done by him.
We are working with huge file sizes, ready for big prints; so one rendering can take somewhere up  between half a day to a day, depending on the scene. In a lot of cases, it is more practical or just the only way to achieve your end-visual by doing the last small or bigger touches in 2D, where of course lighting can be changed if your know-how is good enough.

After the studio shot was finished to some degree, we worked on the camera further with the background included, to make the camera a part of it and two visually separate layers one.
Rain and other details, created in PS, further enhanced the whole visual, that is trying to go one step further than just proving our technique but also our creativity.

I hope you like it. Critical comments are especially welcome though ;)

Yours,
Manuel