remix – Josh Barnett

Been playing with tree meshes and materials, partly to ramp up for a project idea I had and partly just because I’ve seen so many damned impressive archviz renders lately. There’s some really inspiring stuff out there. I used to have this opinion that architectural rendering was more about accuracy than realism and found them generally flat and boring compared to, say, game cinematics. But from what I’ve seen lately their level of detail and photorealism trumps even the most expensive game intros (see Ronen Bekerman, Bertrand Benoit and Peter Guthrie, for example). On the other hand, there’s been quite a shift over the past ten years from pre-rendered to in-game sequences, which could play a part in it also.

Technical acumen aside I’ve also started to appreciate the beauty of a meticulously detailed architectural rendering. Not unlike a well-done landscape, I think archviz too can be inspiring and bring out emotion, capturing the stillness of a moment, the contrast between the natural beauty of trees, land and organic textures with the orderly man-made objects, the way light and shadow play across both. I find it a bit hard to describe, but there’s certainly much more feeling and art in it than a simple presentation of a blueprint to a client in 3D.

Anyway, I’m no architect and only have a vague inspiration here, so I just wanted to play with materials and light and capture that sort of minimalism and stillness.

Switching gears, a couple weeks ago I busted out another Janet remix, this time sort of a quickie. I think it’s actually closer to the original, using mostly 808s. I had an idea to do a soft minimal drum&bass version of it with a little more play on the drums, some LPF chords and a decaying arpeggiated 1/8th note synth. Kind of has a lullaby feel to it, or it would if it weren’t for the pace of the beat.

The majority of my spare visual creative juice has gone into freelance work lately, so I’ve been working on music for fun to keep myself from getting burnt out. This current freelance gig is actually kind of a fun and challenging project and I’ll probably have a fair amount to post when it’s finished, but I think I should refrain in the meantime until the client is satisfied.

So on the music side, I did a quick remix of Busta Rhymes/Janet Jackson’s “What’s it Gonna Be”, just for fun and something I knew Sporkii would like. I think it’s pretty much done.

Since I haven’t had any new artwork to show recently, I thought post something a bit different. Once in awhile Sporkii and I go out for a walk and I bring my 7D along and take dark, blurry macro pictures of nature and decay and apply them to my desktop wallpaper, so here’s a collection of some from the past year.