3D worlds and characters by Jonathan Ball

Jonathan Ball from pokedstudio recently posted his new work created with Blender and Cycles which served as an incentive to look into his earlier work.

Some of the artwork here you’ve already seen on blenderartists and on Blendernation. The following render was used as cover art for Tony Mullen’s latest book, “Mastering Blender”:

Jonathan did a lot of his older work with Blender Internal. Here is how he described setting up scenes in a thread on blenderartists:

I use nodes heavily on the materials in order to create coloured shadows.

First add a sun lamp, set it up for shadows, then duplicate this and create a group with just the duplicated sun lamp.

Then for the material use nodes, create two materials one for the highlights and one for the shadows, add a mix node. Then add a new material, untick spectral on this, then make it use your sun group exclusively.

Then add a colour ramp for the colour out of the new material, connect the colour out of the ramp to the fac of the mix node you’ve already created.

What this means is the the two colours we created for highlights and shadows are now mixed according to the sun intensity and shadow.

The “power mouse” picture above, however, is already rendered with Cycles, like some of the others. In case of Jonathan it’s not easy to pinpoint BI and Cycles-powered renders, though.

But it’s not just Blender’s output. Jonathan does some post-processing with Photoshop as well. Here’s what he said in the same BA thread in October last year:

Often I create a render, duplicate it a few times in Photoshop, and change the colour of each layer, then use masks and rub bits out on various layers. This creates some nice texturing effects that would take ages, if done with materials in blender. It would be so great if there was a merge texture setting in Blender.

The next picture was created with Blender Cycles and, as Jonathan puts it, “a ton of photoshop gloop on top”:

Some of the works here are just fun projects, and some are commisioned work, like these characters for a Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 promo:

And here are characters made for the Sprett brand:

You can find plenty more Jonathan’s artwork in his Flickr stream on the pokedstudio website.