Occasionally things I’ve bought have really changed my life and that of my family. Seeing as I’m not terribly good, or open, in writing about my personal life, I thought I’d run through these inanimate-yet-important objects.

Large format printer

It doesn’t sound like a life changing product, does it? Yet, moving from a good quality Epson A4 printer to a good quality Epson A3+ printer (R1800) made a huge difference to my professional life.

Before, I had had to print and tape together sheets of paper to create larger mockups such as folders, packaging. Buying the printer suddenly enabled me to easily create proofs and mockups of large items, it allowed me to print A3 with bleed. It was not an expensive printer and has since paid for itself over and over in usefulness.

Apple Mac

Yes, predictable I guess, but I have to say that sitting in front of a Mac at Art College enormously changed my life. Until then, I studied film and, although I worked in the film industry for a few years, the seeds of my design career had already been sown.

I continued to play with the Mac, learning applications like Photoshop and Quark, until I landed myself a web design job based on the work I’d produced on that computer. Since then I’ve stayed faithful to the Mac, always preferring the simpler interface, intuitiveness and resultant speed of working. The Mac has since allowed me to pursue a full blown career in graphic design and now stock image creation, too.

Flat screen TV (and DVD/HD recorder)

It’s amazing how this recent purchase has been much more than I expected. We have resisted buying an LCD TV for a long time as it was not an essential purchase but I was getting more and more fed up with our hand-me-down Sony CRT which was huge considering the screen size, had geometry problems, real problems with sharpness in the left and right quarters of the screen and also refused to stay on the screen format you chose.

So, my good friend bought a new TV and when I went over there I was very impressed. I discussed with my wife that we might buy one for ourselves for Christmas. And then Amazon announced a one week only offer on the TV so we jumped.

It’s only a 32″ screen, we don’t need any more. But it’s such a huge improvement in a number of areas.

Firstly, no geometry problems (obviously). The picture is actually straight! Secondly, you can actually access the rear of the television to plug things in – not like our old TV where it was so big it literally went right against the wall. Thirdly, sharpness of image is absolutely wonderful to behold. With games you can finally read small text instead of just guessing. And, not only does it stay on the format you choose but when it’s set to “auto” and you’re watching broadcasts, it switches very quickly to the correct format and stays there.

So, rather than just address one issue, this TV has improved a large number of aspects in one fell swoop and has been a very worthwhile purchase.

As an aside, the DVD/HD recorder we bought about a year ago also had the same kind of effect, improving so many things it was a huge step forward.

Maxon Cinema 4D

Yes, I’m not saying Photoshop changed my life (though I’m sure it did by getting me into design) but instead I’ve singled out Cinema 4D by Maxon. It’s a superb 3D modeling and rendering application which, in the last year, has enabled me to become a serious stock image artist.

The beauty of it is that Cinema 4D is a joy to use and is wonderfully simple. Everything you create is part of an object “tree” which you can see in a side panel, allowing quick and easy manipulation of everything in your scene from models to lights and textures to special effects.

I used Cinema 4D for client work but last year started to use it to realise all kinds of ideas I had for stock, and it has proved to be a fantastic tool to bring these ideas to life. Another reason it’s been so life-changing is that stock is starting to become an alternative income for me and I hope, if I can spend more time on it, stock images may give me the flexibility to change my career a bit and go back to my old design job.

Tonearm, mains conditioner, phono amplifier, record player, speakers…

Yep, I couldn’t talk about life changing purchases without mentioning the audio equipment which recently has been bringing me so much pleasure. Not much point in me going on and on about it here as I do so many hi-fi posts but, suffice to say, I’ve really got the bug in a big way.

My interest in pursuing realistic audio reproduction only enhances my love of music, I think. I certainly wouldn’t say I’ve become blinded by the technology to the point of forgetting the music – there’s so much exciting new music out there every week, the hardest part is deciding what to get!

The music I listen to has become such an integral part of my life that it’s not so much life changing as providing a soundtrack to my life, helping if I feel stressed or down, motivating me to work or just making things better.

Seeing as I’ve mentioned my spare-time stock image creation, I thought you might be interested to see examples of my latest uploads to iStockphoto.

My “sketched earth” globes (top left) have been really popular with their flat paper-like people and objects on the surface of a hand sketched globe with painted sea.

Recently I’ve been really developing my ideas of 3D objects with illustrated graphical elements, as you can see with the microphone, computer network and stethoscope. I think these work well and allow me to really show a concept (like healthy heart) but I want to really push this a lot harder and play with the graphics flowing over the objects.

I was required to do a logo for someone which consisted of an ice cube with a stone frozen into it. We had found a stock photo of an ice cube but it was a lot of money for something which I figured I might be able to create in Cinema 4D.

The end result looks pretty convincing, I think, so I decided to post a small tutorial in the hope that it would be of use to someone else.

Creating the cube

Create a cube primitive, choose Make Editable.

Select the polygon tool, select all faces of the cube and choose Structure > Subdivide with a value of 3. This will give you a cube with 64 polygons per face.

Now you can begin modeling the ice cube. You can start off by doing a Structure > Edit Surface > Crumple with a value of 15m on all polygons. This will give you an uneven surface.

Now create a Hypernurb and drag the cube into it. You will see the smoothed ice cube shape. You may need to tweak the surface polygons later to make it look more realistic.

The ice material

Create a new standard material. Set the parameters as follows:

Colour – a light grey with a slightly blue tinge, 80% brightness.

Transparency – same colour as above, 90% brightness, Refraction n1.3, Fresnel on.

Reflection – colour dark grey, 20% brightness.

Environment – brightness 100%, image is BhodiNUT 3D noise with settings as the screengrab shows:

Specular – Plastic, 37%, 25%, 0%, 0%

Displacement – Strength 50%, height 5 meters, texture BhodiNUT 2D noise with settings as the screengrab shows:

Tweaking the ice cube for realism

You should now have a fairly good looking ice cube. You will need to have a floor colour which is not white, anything else works fine, create a sky object with a sky material applied and set up a couple of lights.

You can see that it is looking pretty good. The only thing left to do is to manually select polygons and drag them around. The basic crumpled cube does so much but real ice cubes are more random – knock the corners in a bit and create some bumps and dips with greater depth. Soon you will have one great looking ice cube!

You can download the ice texture here.

Update January 2008

Seeing as so many people visit this page, I will try and put up other C4D tips, but I guess it would be worth me upgrading to the latest version first. If there are any specific things  you’d like to see please let me know. Bear in mind I’m more likely to put up stuff about textures than about modeling.