IZation Labs

I’ve been playing with the sculpting mechanism in Blender, and created a very basic head model the other night. It’s so easy to use the sculpting tools, and you can create amazing works of art very quickly with it!

I’m saying you can, because I on the other hand still need more practice. Consider this a proof of concept. It is my Alpha-render, as I call it, something that shouldn’t be shown to the public, but what the hey. Next up I need to do some more overhauling and finally educate myself on textures. That will be the Beta.

Also, if you want your models to just generally look better, ie more realistic, just follow this simple Three Point Lighting tutorial. That and research Ambient Occlusion and Subsurface Scattering. Enabling them makes your renders take minutes instead of seconds per frame, but makes it look much more realistic.

I spent probably 4 hours working on creating this animation, along with another few hours tweaking the lighting and settings. It was inspired by this tutorial, a very good one to follow once you have the Blender interface down.

I know those of you who have a little Blender experience probably render out all of your animations as a video. “What’s the point of rendering to all those images,” right?

If you are one of those people, let me tell you my experience.

Reasons to render to an Image Sequence:

• If you have an animation that is taking a long time, you can pause the render on frame X and then restart it the next night, while you are asleep, from the frame after that.
• If something renders wrong in the animation, all you have to do is re-render that single frame that was bad!
• It’s really easy to output a movie after the full quality images in your sequence have been rendered. Just go to the sequence editor and push SHIFT and the AKEY. Click Image Sequence, add your images, and render whatever size video you want in minutes instead of hours.
• Animations should be output as an image sequence. Many of Blender’s features rely on images, not videos!

If you want more information, contact me personally and I will post a mini tutorial on what I know about rendering, including a way to turn your image sequence into a quality video in less than 5 minutes.

Lace

Due to circumstances beyond my control, my Macbook is incapable of connecting to IZationLabs.com at all. The only exception is that it lets me send and receive data via ftp.

The weird thing is that it is only my laptop, and only on the connection relative to my laptop. Everyone else can connect no problem, even my roommate. What in the world is going on here? I don’t think it is anything that I did personally, but I could be wrong. All the site will do is return a 500 server error.

So that is a little upsetting. I’m sending this while waiting in Sill hall, getting ready to sit through a 4 hour electronics lecture. Joy. If you need to contact me, use the Contact Us page, at least that can still get mesages through to me. On the other hand, I can’t even send messages using my mail client. I have to log into a web based mail client to send, but not to recieve.

I’m beginning to think that campus is not entirely Mac friendly.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know. Thanks.

Lace

Ah, sometimes I wish people payed more attention to Mac.

Note to any haters. I don't prefer Mac to Windows, or Windows to Mac. I prefer
linux to both. This is because Windows is too unstable and Mac is too proprietary.
Linux is the bomb. End of story. :]

I run Parallels on my Macbook Pro, because on occasion I want to play a decent game. That and the fact that the only free camera tracker in existence that is commonly used with Blender is a Windows/linux only application. So unfortunately I have to have my XP fix.

What have they done to my beautiful Mac!

If you just asked yourself why I didn't use Vista instead of XP, you should
probably leave before this gets too in depth. Don't want you to hurt yourself.

Isn't it beautiful?

As you can see above, sometimes Mac and Windows don’t play nicely if my Macbook Pro falls asleep while Windows is doing number crunching for one reason or another. Then, when I boot back up, my screen is horribly mangled. It was so beautiful at times that I took some nice pictures, as well as a video. I’m not embedding the video as it has some language that is NSFW. If you want to see it, find your way over to my Vimeo page.

Lace

I can finally find a moment to talk about the dorm and the university!

Our dorms are a little spacier that typical freshman dorms. There are 4 people to a room, and there are two bedrooms with a living area in between the bedrooms. The bathroom is off to the side of the living room. Honestly, there’s plenty of space.

There

Of course, they matched me up with my roommates perfectly. We all listen to good music, play good games, and are into technology and computers at a fairly heavy level. All despite the fact that only two of us have declared technology intensive majors. One of us is going into Network Engineering, one into Nursing, one into (I think) Biology and English, and I have declared a Computer Engineering Technology major.

Plenty of storage space!

There’s a pilot program they are starting here next semester. I’ve had a very positive experience being a test subject in pilot programs, so when the Dean of the College of Technology here told us of this new program, my ears perked up.

The new program is Gaming, Animation, and Simulation. The core of the education is learning to do CG animation. They teach you by making you develop video games, with the ultimate goal being CG animated simulation, as I understand it. My ears perked when I heard animation. I love bringing things to life on the computer, and I would jump at the chance to get involved in a program like that. Read more »

All are broken in one way or another. No, really.

As the months battle ever onward, I enjoy making a habit of jumping around to my usual online stores and checking out the newest computer component prices.

Almost every time I find myself in the position to think, “Oh! Hey! I bought that 3 months ago for double the price! Cool!”

Of course I always check out Tiger Direct and Newegg, but there’s one that some people haven’t heard of, and it is my favorite of all, mainly because I love upgrading my flash memory collection. Dealram is part of a bigger site called dealnews, where people report the best deals on all things electronic. The cool part is that it doesn’t seem forum based, which may be a turn on for some people due to its quirky, semi haphazard arrangement. Instead, it acts like a business in itself. You search for products, and the best deals that are the most up to date appear in a heartbeat.

I was amazed but not surprised, if that’s even possible, to find out that for the price I purchased my 16 gig flash drive for last winter, I can now buy a 32 gig replacement. Think about that. That is a huge decrease in price. And what’s more, 64 Gig flash drives are, at the time of writing this, under 500 dollars. Wait 6 months. I guarantee they will be under 250, probably closer to 100.

It just blows my mind every time. Do you remember when you first bought a flash drive? I believe mine was a 64 meg. Weighing in at close to 40 dollars, that was a lot of money for such a small amount of storage. But it didn’t feel like that then.

64 megabytes! Wow! I’ll actually be able to move my dos games around now. I can get them off of that old computer and onto my parents new laptop… I won’t have to rely on those darn floppies anymore!

I had no idea that a few years later a 32 gig flash drive could be purchased for under 100 dollars. What about a year from now? What about 4? At the rate that technology seems to be improving and prices dropping, by then we could be storing Terabytes of data on something barely larger that our fingernail, and at an affordable price.