The Crawler's Queen

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/

Butterfly city - Concept Design & CG

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.

Illusionist promo campaign

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 his campaign. 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 – Business Identity

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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 Presentation – Multimedia & Animation

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 is the 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 of 14 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 2D flat slide that looked 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.

Doble de Shakira – Web Design

Noelia Quiroz is Shakira’s official impersonator in Chile. She has had some appearances on TV shows like Don Francisco's and alikes, and does regular performances for business corporative events at reknown hotels, theaters, etc. Since her representatives already offer her services by other means different than the Internet, and the signing of her contracts run through other promotional formats, the commercial reason for her to have her web site done was rather to get to the common people who has seen her in her shows, but not necessarily appealing to the taste of those who really pay for her services (producers, marketing managers, etc). So I kept that very much in mind while thinking of the type of image I was going to portray of her and the tastes of the eventual users of the web site I was to design. I was certain that it had to be something with high contrasts, high levels of saturation and with a “spirit” appealing to what people are rather used to see on TV: motion, reflections, lights, etc. In other words, a very pop type of imagery and not a mere abstract designer's exercise.



Eventhough I was first asked by my client to only do a take off on the real Shakira’s web site, I proposed him we could do something a little bit more interesting, since we didn’t have so much to say about Noelia and her web site was not going to have as many items on the menu as the real Shakira does. So if we did a take off, Noelia’s site was going to look only like a boring copy of Shakira’s. I told him them that we could use the sentence “Doble de Shakira” (Shakira’s impersonator) in a literal way and from there I could develope an attractive imagery to go along with the so reduced menu Noelia had for showing. In Spanish “Doble the Shakira” also sounds as if saying “double album by Shakira”. If one listens to the sentence it becomes then a game of words meaning one obvious thing on one hand (the impersonator), but another different meaning at a second thought (an album).



So, that came out as the final reason for her web site to start by showing a CD case that opens up and shows 2 Cd’s on the inside (like a double album) and that’s the reason for all the reflections on the floor (as if getting closer to the idea of mirrors). And that’s the reason why i keep an image of Noelia at the background all the time, so that when a user surfs through an item of the menu, Noelia will end up being present on the scene twice. The “twiceness”, so to speak, was my undercover concept behind every detail of the page. Eventhough it's a web site that can be entirely surfed in just a few minutes, it has lots of motion and sound effects that may last very little, but each one of then was accurately done so as to make the viewer somehow feel like watching something more like a "commercial" instead of seeing a stiff design work. I didn't really want to go too far on the effects though, because I didn’t want for it to look too kitch, since the saturated colors, and the whole composition was already playing an important role on doing that. My client ended up very satisfied with the results and, up to now, it seems that those who visit her web page too. Based on that, we developed other promotional material for printed formats. My client is still working out the rights to some other soundtrack to play on the back while surfing the site. Once that’s finished, I believe it’ll give even more strength to the perception of motion.

Styledent - Concept & Web Design

Styledent is a Dental Clinic in Santiago, Chile, whose customers are mainly people from the domestic showbiz with a rather “refined” profile, between their 30’s and 40’s. My client asked me to do the whole concept design starting up from zero for he wanted to change completely the business identity the clinic had before: logotype, slogan, business cards, web site, etc. I proposed him then we should give Styledent a very delicate profile almost as if offering a beauty service more than a “doctor” type of thing, so as to look somehow elegant but not old, delicate but not feminine (since the target market was also men), and sophisticated but not too classy. Besides, for what I saw, most people that visited the clinic didn't really go there for too complex dental procedures, but rather for whitening or small porcelain fixes.

My client agreed, since the idea also matched one of the first conditions he put for the project: to make Styledent’s image identity completely different from the regular dental clinic, and to get away from the so hospital looking web pages he had seen all the time when it came to dental care. So I began observing certain textures like velvet or fine suede on which I inspired the making of the interface. But I also needed for the imagery to recall somewhat the dental care part of it without being too obvious though.

So I chose different elements as the x-rays, some dental tools and also some paper sheets and threw them on top of the velvet-like material to achieve different compositions. So the “spirit” of the web site was to always have pretty much the same elements present: the girl, the sheet, the tapes, the x-ray, the pins, etc. but they’d be moving around and rearranging into a different composition every time the user would click on a different item of the menu – Of course, motion is a condition for most of my web site design projects for I do believe surfing the web should be a experience different from reading a book or a magazine. The world is not stiff and therefore the Internet shouldn't be eigther. Unless you are to read documents or blogs like this one you're reading right now in which the main purpose is to have you comprehending a certain subject. In the case of commercial web sites, motion is also a good device that helps me keep every visitor interested in surfing it, for we all know that the capabilities of people to concentrate on regular reading has become much lower in the recent decades.

But after all the motion and rearranging thing, it still looked too flat. So I sent my photographers to the clinic to see if they could capture some broad spaces that I could use to give more depth of field to the compositions I had worked on already.

The place was fine, but it looked too much like a clinic still, so we focused only on the objects we found there that didn’t looked as white or dull as the regular "world" of dentists. So we picked fine flooring, bluish artifacts for whitening, some blue room we found there, etc, and I rebuilt them into a 3D projection the way I needed. Well, here are the results. These are just a a few screen shots from Styledent’s official web site and some other promotional work (rather printed). Guess it met the goal and, of course, the budget previously determined. ‘Cause we designers know that no design work should ever be measured only by a esthetical judgement, but upon three main aspects instead: commercial objectives, budget and time. One has to meet the objective goal, at the lesser time, using only the resources taht the budget allows. So one just tries to do the best posible upon the circumstances. If you visit the site www.styledent.cl, and decide to send a comment on the form, you'll see a quick animated surprise that activates once the message goes through.

Palais du Taureau - CG & Animation

This project started up as an unaccomplished desire I always had from previous works done for customers. As a multimedia designer and art director, I had already been assigned to do 3d projections of certain buildings before but I never really got satisfied enough with the aesthetical results as to put them in my portfolio.

So I decided to model this 3D palace with the maximum stylistic details of my choice. I know it came out as a hybrid architectural creation, rather inspired on the fantasies of a hybrid minded designer, but it does work as a good example of the marvelous range of posibilities when it comes to 3D animation. It has a rather overall bizantine look, but it’s full of details appealling to ancient classical ornaments instead, and a few neoclassical gadgets intended for it to give a more reasonable and reliable appeareance.

I took it somehow like a “jump” in history between one architectural style to the other. I wanted for it to have a much pagan look, as if being an honorable praise to some concept as “Strength” (that’s the reason for the bull on top). The bronze greek soldiers are the guardians to that “Strength” idol, lower below are the enchanted female figures at the corners of the main shell structure.Dolphins are supposed to be the guardians to those delicate female figures, while the cupids at the bottom are the first line of soldiers defending the palace: as if Love meaning the first expression of Strength.

It took me over 240 million polygons to create this whole palace plus the entire scenery.Since it took me too long for the modeling process, I decided to do the final rendering with only 4 rays per pixel, otherwise the rendering per frame was going to be so massive that I wasn’t gonna get to finish it on time. I believe that since I was extremely cautious on the behaviour of light over every surface, that the final product still works pretty well with even a low range of rays of depth