This is part of the Butterflycity illustration series. It depicts the scene when the Crawlers decide to build their own queen as a response to the Butterflies' Queen arrival. However, something goes wrong, the crawlers engineers don’t do the right calculations and the creature-machine-building comes out as a hybrid zoomorphic creation that would turn out the butterflycity world into a realm even more complex than it already was. While working on it, I got a bit inspired on two main aesthetic references: the style of painted illustrations done by Simon Bisley (a comic book artist I was a fan of when being a little kid) and also by the machine-like creatures called Zerg from a game I used to play quite often back a decade ago: Starcraft, eventhough I always found back then that the graphics for such an awesome game were a bit weak. Well, nowadays cg technology allows us to do much more complex renderings and visual creations, as the one you see here. Hope you people like it.
This is not a set of separate illustrations, it's actually the same large illustration shown by parts (details) I selected. The original piece is meant to be enjoyed not only as a whole, but also part by part, that's why I took so much time to work out every single detail of this massive rendering.Because of copyright reasons I won't post any larger version of the full poster, but you can find out more about this project at http://paretti.cgsociety.org/gallery/
This is a concept design, illustration and modeling project based on the idea of insect forms merging with industrial and urban shapes. Certain parts of the bugs I achieved through 3D software, however the whole project is mainly worked by vector drawing and bitmap editing (PS).The environment in which the butterflies and bugs exists was supposed to be quite industrial and technological, and somewhat a fantasy only posible from cg, with colors and transparencies colliding, plane overlapping, convex and concave zones merging and other visual arrangements to give a rather graphical appearance to the images instead of a painted or photographic look.
To find out more details on Patricio Paretti's Butterfly City Concept Design and CG, you can visit http://paretti.cgsociety.org *We suggest you copy and paste the link in the address bar of your web browser, otherwise you may be redirected to the cg society's home page.
My client, a quite talented illusionist and stage magician, asked me to design a whole promo campaign for him. The concept behind this project came out quite clear: certain touch of misticism, and a sort of darkness was going to be depicted in most of the graphic work for hiscampaign. But when it came to develope his web site, o decided to focus on quick motion and visual effects as a means to strengthen the idea of “illusion”. At the same time, he didn’t really want to look like the typical old fashioned magician, but rather contemporary, young and somewhat related to technology, fantastic scenery, etc. I mainly used Flash and After effects for this web site and only small almost rather unseen and unimportant details rendered by 3d software. However it came out as a fine product full of motion, depth of field and its overall aesthetics recalls rather a computer game dynamics. His posings were inspired on some well reknown imagery like the movie The Illusionist, or the painting “Cruxifición” by Salvador Dali.
Naturalia is a company for whch I developed an entire business identity starting from scratch. The company was new in the field and wanted to have a fine well designed corporative image. So I focused in the concepts of Beauty and Nature, that dealed with the services of my client: gardening , environmental design, commerce of plants and fllower specied, etc. I also took in consideration the target market my client was approaching: large businesses willing to generate budget for garden enhancement, large natural decoration projects, etc.
I wanted for Naturalia to look somewhat as a “feminine” firm, that would show a great talent and sensitivity towards beauty of nature and its practical uses for corporative decoration. But I didn’t really wanted to look too barroque, nor too old fashioned, but rather elegant and contemporary. The high intensity of the white backgroungs played an important role achieving that. Here I show I few pieces of the whole project, that went from stationary to web design and interactive catalogs.
Since I needed for every single detail to entitle de whole concept behind the business, I also took sometime to design the chief manager’s “corporative” signature, because it was going to appear on some editorial parts of the graphic material. I took some of the images I show here from some pages of the printed version of my 2009 portfolio. If you’d like to see them in their web context, you can visit my client’s web site.
D&S is one of the largest retail business in Chile (recently associated to Wal Mart), with over 40.000 employees all along the country. Therefore, the company keeps several corporative activities for their workers. One of those activities isthe annual award given to the employees with better performance at their respective branches. The main ceremony for this is a massive event held at the D&S Headquarters in Santiago once a year. During the ceremony, a multimedia presentation of the winners is shown on large screen for the audience. I was asked then to do such presentation.
I had already carried out other graphic, multimedia and audiovisual projects for them before. But this one presentation is one I love the most because of the difficulties implied in meeting the final objectives: 1-To show a very brief review of the 160 awarded workers, without it being a boring page after page reading nor a senseless slide show. 2-To make a visually very atractive, creative and unique presentation keeping up the conservative graphic profile the company already has. 3- To make it and program it in a ways that wouldn’t be a nonstop movie but rather a “surfable” application so the announcer of the ceremony could go along with it while speaking by microphone to the audience. 4- From the time the job was assigned to the time the ceremony was going to take place there were only 5 weeks. 5 -The photographs of the people to be shown in the multimedia presentation were going to be provided by my client (we designer's know that's always bad news).
I also encounter an internal problem with my crew of assistants for I had them all busy at the time in other projects. So, I was going to have to do this multimedia presentation all by myself inpite of the lesser time I got left and inspite of the unreasonable amount of work that it meant:
-photographic enhancement of over 480 images;
-motion an visual effects separately for every single one of those 480 images;
-design an animation of the whole interface;
-a 40 second intro 3D animation;
-the rendering of a whole virtual scenery for the intro;
-the animation for the “mascot” of the presentation (the clown) that was going to be always present as if showing the winners;
-the animation of14 different menus shown as balls floating on the air;
-especial effects of lights, shadows, sparkles, smoke, etc for every single one of those 168 balls;
-the design and motion of over 200 different windows;
-the redrawing and motion effects for 5 different logotypes;
-the editing of all the texts provided by my client and the perfect fit to each one of the winners mentioned on the presentation;
-the sound editing for the soundtrack and sound effects; the programming of each interpolation from one menu to the other;
-the programming of the whole thing so it’d work as my client wanted; and plus, all the visual elements mentioned above had to be syncronized by actionscript.
-And besides all that... I still had to be creative and see how to make it fun for the viewers. I strongly believe I do love my work.
I came out with this idea of having an intro with a little mistic touch: (see first images of this article) the name of the company inscribed on some spheres (the same spheres that were part of some kind of motto of D&S), but all portrayed in a virtual ambience, with lots of depth of field as if relating the spirit of the company to something infinite and sublime, all done by CG. And then the spheres would come closer to the screen and converted into the negative space of the interface so for the presentation of the menus to start.
It was like merging a 3d world into a 2Dflat slide thatlooked more like the graphic design of the books and stationary that D&S usually has (blue & white). I did this because I had to bring the overall image of the presentation to match the conservative graphic profile of the company, and I didn’t really want for the people of the audience to think they were watching something more like a science fiction movie instead of a business presentation. I few seconds of dreamingly 3d ambience at the beginning would do it (see first images of this article).
I also used a blue clown I saw on the printed material that came along with this ceremony and decided to bring him lo life, by making him jump, or do different acrobacies previous to show each menu.
I also thought it was going to be a good idea for the interface not to look too much like a flat design graphic all the time, so I gave certain photographic effects as gaussian blurring, reflactal rays, etc everytime a window would open.
Once it was finished I was quite satisfied with the results। The goal was met. Since i never really got a free रेलेसेद signed by the 168 people awarded (therewas no need to, for this was only presentation done for D&S for internal purposes) I won’t show the parts of the presentation that contained motion images of them. But all of these images shown in this case study correspond to different scenes of the final product.
