IZation Labs

Lo, everyone!

So finals this fall semester are coming to a close here at Eastern Michigan University. Soon student’s sleep schedules will return to whatever is normal for college kids these days, the computer labs will empty, and SAG majors everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief, so glad to have even finished their projects that they couldn’t possibly begin to worry about the actual grade they will receive, which I hope will be good for all of us.

My most recent reason to celebrate is the completion of the final project that has been looming over me (driving me mad with worry) since early November, when I fell rather behind in a number of classes due to an accident that I sustained. After I spent a week in decontamination and the suits told me not to play with plutonium anymore, I had difficulty catching back up in classes. (Seriously though, it was a severe concussion.)

SAG 305, Environmental Design; A course meant to teach the basic concepts behind architectural design and BIM, one of the most common kinds of environments in which humans find themselves situated. While spending a semester studying Autodesk’s Revit software package, we 305-ers were tasked with selecting an on-campus building (or off campus, with approval) for recreating in the software package of our choice. Most chose Revit. A few others chose Autodesk 3ds Max. One nut even went with some open source software called Blender.

Below is a gallery of incremental renders created over the course of two days that display my progress in my final project, which was the Starkweather building here at EMU. Yes, I did wait too long to start it, mostly because I was still playing catch up in most of my classes. Also you can click HERE to explore the flash interface that lets you click through and explore the building from different angles, which was the actual final project that was demonstrated in class.

Expect a few more final project posts here at the labs as finals come to a close!

-Lace

Sleep comes easier for me now that I’ve started up my most recent caffeine ban, but that won’t stop me from adding a few newish photos

I’m finally starting to generate some images and content that I feel I can be proud of. Things that aren’t exactly out of this world, but are also good enough to not get comments like ‘Dude. Is that supposed to be a car or a bird?”

I honestly believe in using whatever tools best suit you. Much of what you see here is generated in Blender, unless I mention otherwise. I’m just a Blenderhead, through and through. I’ve a professor who knowingly joked that if I thought I could get away with it, I would do all of my modeling in Blender and just import it as a .obj into 3ds Max for the 3ds based Studio 1 class in which I’m currently enrolled. The class erupted into laughter, myself included, mostly because we all know that he is perfectly correct.

The two new uploads for the evening have got a few weeks on them now, but they include a textured football and football helmet. These were given to us as models and we were to texture them in 3ds Max. Enjoy!

-Lace

I know, I know. No summer posts, what was I THINKING? (Lacey, you got some splainin’ to do!) I promise, explanations later, right now I just need to get this out in the open in case anyone ends up having the same problem that I just did. No one should have to work that out on their own if at all possible.

I’ve always had problems with my external hard drive. So many that I don’t know why I still have it, but that’s beside the point. It’s a 1 TB, two drive MyBook Pro formatted by and being run on Mac OSX. Note: This is the second time this has happened in as many summers. Somewhere along the line, the Mac OSX just decides it doesn’t want to freely let go of the drive, and wipes out my partition table, leaving my hard drive feeling incredibly brick-like. My data is still physically there. There was just NO way to get to it.

I found some help from a number of places, the best of which is this website:

http://perrohunter.com/read/30/repair-a-mac-os-x-hfs-partition-table

So following the instructions, testdisk to the rescue, to an extent. This at LEAST let me see that my data was still there and gave me valuable information about the drive.

But that wasn’t enough.

The drive was non writable. No matter what combination of unmounting, different connections into both Windows and Mac machines, I couldn’t progress through the instructions, as pdisk still claimed that the disk was, in essence, write protected, and that I should go home kid, you got no talent. There was just NO way to rewrite the dead partition table.

After four hours of play time on both Windows and Mac, with my head hung in despair, I decide what the heck, I’ll try it on one of my Ubuntu machines in my workshop.

Lo and behold! It mounts. It’s accessible. In fact, nothing at all seems wrong with it. Strange, I thought. Maybe by plugging it into Ubuntu it repaired the partition table. So I plug it back into my Mac. Again, no dice. But that’s okay, because I have access now through Ubuntu, and can copy the files to a different drive and then reformat, right?

Almost. One of my folders has a different owner from the owner/user ID on the Ubuntu machine. So I’m not allowed to access that folder or its contents in any way. The drive is still non-writeable as a whole, so I can’t change file permissions, and can’t change the owners, throwing chmod and chown out the window.

And here’s the saving grace. What if, I wonder, I created a new user on my Ubuntu machine to match the user ID of the Mac account, which I could see by selecting the inaccessible folder and looking through its properties. This may be a big DUH for some people, but for someone relatively new to *nix, it was a tremendous moment of possible comprehension for me.

Surprise. It worked. Created a new user with an identical UID, logged in, and there are my files, ripe for the transferring.

I sincerely hope that that helps someone. If it just saves ONE person from the headache I just had, it was worth the time writing the experience out. If you need more detailed steps along these lines, comment on the article and I’ll see what I can do.

-Lace

This was just too cool not to post. This will be especially thrilling if you are interested in lightning, sparks, electricity, or anything high voltage. Watch it first, then I’ll comment on it.

What’d you think? Wasn’t that incredible? These folks are basically using their GIANT Tesla coils as amplifiers, controlling the sparks similar to the way one would a speaker, making it vibrate at a certain controlled frequency to create different notes!. The guy who was playing with electricity? He has some serious guts. What an amazing show, what I wouldn’t give to see them live.

-Lace

Just a quick post today. It’s worth noting that Blender version 2.57 has been officially released!

Blender 2.57 is the first non-beta version of Blender’s newest incarnation. What does this mean to you? If you’ve already been using the 2.5 series beta versions, this means that a solid, stable version has released for you to play with, with a few new and changed features and far fewer bugs! If you’ve been holding off on the 2.5 series and are still working with a 2.4 Blender, you are in for a treat. Blender 2.5 has a fresh new code base, a reorganized and very intuitive and efficient GUI, tons of new features like volumetric smoke and flames, and overall just more powah!

If you haven’t even heard of Blender, well what are you waiting for! It’s a free (as in beer) 3D graphics package that can hold it’s own against the big boys. Sound too good to be true? I’m not exaggerating. It is an absolutely amazing package.

Head on over to Blender.org to check it out. You won’t regret it!

-Lace

Finals are looming, with the first final projects due next week. I’ve been busy working away in 3ds Max, Inventor, Blender, and Final Cut, but I’ve neglected my posting ‘duties’ in the process. Apologies!

This year I was asked to be part of an Undergraduate Symposium along with a fellow classmate of mine, Gary Tatrow. The Symposium was to focus on something I was already getting into in my independent study. The goal was to create a quality sports graphic using the equipment we had on hand to demonstrate what students in the SAG program at Eastern Michigan University are capable of, as well as to start the process of developing the workflow required to create our sports team’s graphics in house.

The following video shows a breakdown of the different components and how they were laid together. All in all it was a very interesting experience, one that I would be happy to do again next year.

-Lace

This was an educational test in which I shot immobile tripod footage and tracked a number of points on my palm using Syntheyes.

Once the points were tracked in Syntheyes the data was imported into Blender, where the monkey head primitive built into Blender (Suzanne) was composited into the shot, seemingly resting on my hand. I had a few issues. I can’t seem to figure out how to get shadows working properly *an issue I solved after writing this article*.

You can see there is a bit of ghosting around the hand, due to the quick ‘mesh’ I made of the hand on which the shadows were placed. A little bit of editing would clean it up, but at this point this test as served its purpose. Onward to bigger and better things. There is a small amount of slippage / jitter between the 3D element and the video footage due to inexperience using Syntheyes on my part. Hey, that’s what these exercises are for!

I would be a bit more in depth with this post, but the wee hours of the morning are upon me and I need to get some sleep, so how about this. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave me one right at the bottom of this page!

-Lace