IZation Labs

Same video, higher quality.  Rendered using the Internal Renderer instead of just OpenGL. I think the next thing I would like to do would be to break the leg away from the round section on top, and make it pivot at that point. Then, that round top section will go up inside the machine where it can turn on circular tracks to change the angle at which the leg points.

While purely asthetic, I would also like to add some working hydraulic pistons.

–Lace

After a great deal of research and experimenting, I finally finished constraining the Walker Leg properly. There is one last bit of functionality that I would like to add, but that can be done later when I have more free time. Each piece is parented to a point on the piece above it, a sort of hierarchy. That, combined with some rotation and location constraints, makes the leg move as realistically as possible/necessary.

I’ll be posting a shaded version later. This video is the quality I see when working inside blender, and only takes about five minutes to render since it uses OpenGL.

–Lace

Here’s a video made in Blender by Alex Polkinghorn, a College-Now Student at North Central State College. He made the fire by following a tutorial by Nion, in which particle effects do most of the work. Well done!

If anyone knows the link to the tutorial, please leave a comment below the article. Thanks!

–Lace

For my LITR class, our final assignment is rightly referred to as The Paper of Many Parts. The paper focuses on a poem of our own choosing, and I chose ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. For those of you who have seen the horribly inaccurate 1995 classic, ‘Hackers’, you have already be introduced to the poem. At one point towards the beginning of the movie, the protagonist and his high school teacher have a short conversation, in which the protagonist used a line from ‘Howl’ as his in class assignment. The line reads as follows:

Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

This is by far my favorite line of poetry that I have ever come across. So, upon finding out that one of the six ‘parts’ of the assignment requires us to come up with a creative visual work to be included with our paper, I couldn’t help but turn to Blender for all my imaging needs.

This sequence depicts, quite literally, a starry dynamo in the machinery of the night. The star field was created using Blender’s built in stars functionality, and the object’s vertices were made into ’stars’ by turning on the halo setting in the render pipeline.

–Lace

Announcing the One a Week modeling contest!

Alright, it’s less of a contest and more of an exercise for myself. My goal is to model at least one household object a week (and bump that up to a day, once my schedule allows), in the hopes that doing so much modeling will not only leave me with an abundance of models to draw upon, but also improve my modeling skills. So to get things started, here is a model of a flashlight that I made.

Tada! If you want your model to show up on the main page, drop me an email, as I’m happy to show off other people’s hard work as well! Blend on!

–Lace

My Shapeways model has arrived! The King model from my chess animation has shipped, and I’m very pleased with it. It has the texture of relatively fine sandpaper, close to 300 grit if my memory serves me. The detail is rather incredible, it wouldn’t take much work at all to smooth it out a bit and paint it. Sanding is barely even necessary, it was printed at such a high resolution. Wow. I never though I would see the day when I could talk about the resolution of real world objects. Click on a picture to view them in higher resolution.

Anyway, I’m really happy with how the model turned out, and would suggest to anyone reading this that when they are happy with a 3D model they have been working on, if they want something tangible they can hold in their hands, head on over to Shapeways and consider printing it out. Ten days later, you will be holding a solid embodiment of your work in your hands, and it’s an incredible feeling. And if you aren’t into modeling but still find yourself intrigued by the concept at hand, they have tons of printable premade models that others have uploaded, so what’s stopping you? Check it out! Heck, start by looking at the Shapeways page for this very model!

–Lace

I’ve mentioned Shapeways before, and I finally decided that it might be time to give them a shot. For a quick recap, they are a 3D printing company that caters to… relatively poor artists. Which means that their prices are much more manageable than most. The only homemade model I had on hand to send in was the king model from the (still) unfinished chess animation that I made, as seen here in the bottom right hand of the picture.

My part is scheduled to arrived today (April 6th), so expect a photo update soon!

Here’s the next model I plan to have printed, assuming I ever decide I want to add enough detail to make it worthwhile. I sketched the concept one night when I didn’t have any early classes and the caffeine was strong within me, and it has been developing ever sense. It’s my current ‘pet’ project. I’m hoping to use it to learn mechanical rigging and animation as well.

I know there are plenty of Star Wars fans out there. I’m not big on Star Wars, (just the special effects involved), but yes, I DO know it looks like an ‘ATAT’. That’s not what I was going for, but hey, it is what it is.

–Lace