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-Lace

(If you want to, I would suggest taking the time to watch the video in HD rather than the default, it looks much better that way.)

Something that helped a great deal for this project was the addition of a newly built networked attached storage server, also known as a NAS. The system I built is running a free operating system called FreeNAS, and allows me to store and access all of the project files together in a central place on my home network. Eventually I may try configuring port forwarding and a service like DynDNS so that I can access my files from school and other places as well over the internet.

One of the nicest things about the new server, however, is its amount of storage and backup capabilities. HD footage can be a bit of a storage hog, with an hour of footage taking up as much as forty-some gigs of space. Inside this standard off-the-shelf parts NAS machine are two two-terabyte SATA hard drives that are basically identical twins, straight down to the data. They are connected together via a form of software raid, meaning that if one of the two hard drives die, I still have my data safe and sound on the other one until I can replace the failed drive. I had to lose a terabyte of data before I understood how useful raid could be.

In other news, I just recently finished a new and much lengthier project with the help of a close friend. I’ll be posting a video and information about it soon, so check back often!

-Lace

The tracking was done using Syntheyes, the same software used for tracking in films such as Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland, and Avatar. If it isn’t already, Syntheyes is becoming an industry standard. However, if you can’t afford the license, the Voodoo camera tracker works rather well, and is free for the most part.

The compositing and CG effects were done using the node editing engine in Blender 3D, a free and open source program that continues to improve daily.

For a look at what the best of the best can do with Blender, check out this Sintel trailer, the newest short film from the Blender Foundation coming out in a few months

Critiques are welcome. More to come.

-Lace

A new material has been added to the selections at Shapeways. It’s name: Sandstone. It is the newly appointed cheapest material to print in, beating out Strong, White, and Flexible by a third of the price. It only costs one dollar to print a cubic centimeter of this stuff.

The truly amazing thing, as alluded to in the title, is that the material can be printed in full color. That’s right. Full color. Some of you might be thinking ‘So?’ or ‘Hmph. About time’. Others who know a bit more about the mechanics of 3D printing are amazed and overjoyed at this next step in the right direction. The logistics and technical difficulties in pulling off full color printing amaze me, and the new ways things can be printed rocks my world.

FULL COLOR. My mind is blown, Shapeways. Well played.

Go here to learn more about this newest material and it’s capabilities.

–Lace

Alchemic Necklace

This work was made using a reference image from one of my favorite animated series’, Full Metal Alchemist. It’s the necklace that one of the key characters use to ‘fuel’ the kind of stylistic alchemy that she prefers. Bonus points if you can tell me the name of the character.

This model is of sufficient size to be worn on a chain around the neck. ($5.00 USD)

Pokemaninizer Badge

Made as a gag for a close friend of mine who has a crush on a trainer from the popular cartoon series. This friend is quite the ‘maninizer’.

The model is roughly the size of a quarter. ($5.00 USD)

BahtHead 0.6

BahtHead 0.6 is one of my favorite models to date. He’s such a strange little robot head. He has a full body now, but so far only the head is printable.

He’s 2 X 2.4 X 2.2 inches. ($20.00 USD)

IZL Medallion/Coin – BahtHead

An IZL Character Coin, this one is the head of the robotic figure in shown above. The front has the face of the head on it as well as the saying ‘Normal is a failure of Potential’. At the bottom are the letters ‘IZL’. On the back is the back of the robot head, topped by the website URL.

The printout is just slightly larger than a typical US quarter, and about twice as thick. ($5.00 USD)

IZL Geared Necklace (Parts)

The parts to an IZL branded geared necklace. This item is meant to be a worn and should assemble and spin properly after the parts have been printed. *ASSEMBLY IS REQUIRED for this model.*

This model is 3 X 2.5 X 0.8 inches. ($20.00)

If the other model which is printed fully assembled comes to me and works as is it will become available for printing, and may replace this model.

Reminiscent Skeleton Key

A skeleton key inspired by a fantastic series. It is oddly familiar, like a lost item, or a scattered dream that’s like a far off memory…

Hopefully this key will help you line the pieces up.

It is nearly 3 X 1 X .3 inches. ($5.00)

If there is something specific you would like to see modeled and printed, get in touch with me and we’ll talk ‘business’. I’m always willing to consider doing some custom or specialized work, and I would love to hear any input or criticisms, as always!

–Lace

It took four or five days to render this out, as I used some badly implemented concepts to make the ground look better which took up far more processing power than If I had just modeled the ground to begin with. Final product is close to what I was aiming for anyway.

–Lace

I know he’s not finished, there are plenty of places that I’ll still tweak. Next up, I have to snap on some rubber gloves and start watching some hardcore rigging tutorials. This should be interesting.

The head is, to my knowledge, printable, but I haven’t done a test order yet. The body won’t be printable for a while still.

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome! I need the input! You there! I’m imagining that look on your face. You have something to say, to suggest, don’t you? Spit it out!

–Lace

Most of these models were done in a single sitting, though one or two are still works in progress. All were done in 2.49b. There is a model or two that I’ve done in the new 2.5, but… suffice it to say, they aren’t quite ready for daylight yet.

On a personal note, my favorite is the robot head.

–Lace

via — BlenderNation

–Lace

The end of the piston is parented to an empty, and the empty is parented to the through rod which is connected to the flywheel. The in-out movements of the piston and cylinder are calculated automatically. The only thing animated in the video is the flywheel’s turning along it’s y-axis. I’ve been wanting to play with this for a long time. Next up, a steam engine!

I’ve another video rendering out right now. It’s taking awhile, it’s HD and render time is half an hour or so per frame. Can you say ‘not optimized’? Oh well.

–Lace

Many examples of the capabilities of this system can be found online, particularly on youtube and vimeo. The higher you pump the resolution, the more realistic the smoke looks!

That’s about it for this post, but here’s a teaser. For those of you interested in RFID technology, expect a very interesting post mid-December.

–Lace

I’ve a few hours before class, so I’m going to work on getting the forums back to one hundred percent. Look for a new section under the IZL forums; Brainstorming.

–Lace

In Blender, the particle physics system lets you simulate and control the movement of many small agents in a physics system. You can make them react to gravity, you can make them explode like sparks off of the end of a gun, or even use them to simulate smoke and fire.

In this instance, I made use of Boids. The boids system is similar to the kind of system referenced in Prey, the agents in the simulation are given a predator/prey relationship. The predators will attack and ‘eat’ the prey. The basics of creating such a system can be found here. After much tweaking and rendering, here is one of the video results of the predator prey interactions.

One last thing. Things had become out of control on the forums, and in the process of resetting it, users and posts were lost. We’ve basically started over, so if you had an account you WILL have to re-register. A clean slate is what was needed though, so here’s hoping things go smoother the second time around.

Cheers!

Lace

This Air cannon took about an hour to model, it's from a concept I sketched a few days prior.

Lace

After reading through a 4 year old story concept I wrote years back, I realized that the key part of the special effects involved in the story was something I always wanted to do in film rather than just on paper. One of the key components in the story, an item which the special effects often revolve around, is an old fountain pen. So that’s what I spent a bit of my day working on today, modeling the main part of the fountain pen. It’s detailed enough to stand up under fair scrutiny when composited into video footage, which is what I was going for. The next step, should I decide to take it, is to texture the model.

I modeled this fountain pen using one that I had laying on my desk as inspiration. Click on it to bring up the full size image.

Cheers!

Lace

I've been doing some sketchwork on a scene I want to model, here's an early stage of the main development building.

 
 
Here’s a model I made of a building I had sketched out a while ago. The proportions aren’t quite right yet, the building is ultimately supposed to be a hanger for very large aircraft. The sketch is much larger but I don’t want to give away too much too quickly.

The model only took a little while to make. The difficult part will be getting the proportions right. My todo list on this model is as follows:

• Resize and create holes for windows
• Resize walkway
• Finish modeling the water tower
• Model extras (rooftop fans, buckets a dumpster for the side of the building)
• Texture
• and anything else I’ve forgotten…

Maybe someday this model will see the light of day ‘fully dressed’, as it were.

Shown here is the basic node setup after tweaking.

I followed a tutorial on CGCookie yesterday about creating node libraries and started to realize for myself how powerful nodes must be in educated hands. Feeling inspired, I felt the first thing I had to do was decide on some abstract, though meaningful text to render. Eclectic as my mind is, it latched onto a quote from TS Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’; “This is the way the world ends.” Coming up in a close second was a quote by Aristotle; “Hope is but a waking dream”.

After copying the node setup from the video and setting up the text and ipo keyframes the way I wanted them, it was time to do some test renderings. Once satisfied the settings had been tweaked enough, I rendered the animation to separate 1920X1080 frames then in another blend to a high resolution video file. (Followed by, of course, to FLV for uploading to the site.)
 
 
 

And here’s the final output. Best to view it full screen to really get an idea of how it looks. The compression pixelated it a bit but overall it’s a pretty nice effect, not to mention it’s very easy to change and reapply thanks to nodes!

Cheers!

Lace

The left eye....something strange is going on here..

Alright, not so much candy as it is special effects.. involving the eye. Horrible pun, I admit, but the effect is still interesting to watch considering the relative simplicity involved in this special effects/compositing test. The video at the end of the article will show off the final result.

Using Blender (and, for the first time, compositing nodes), I hand tracked the movement of my eye from some video footage taken using my laptop’s built in webcam at the decent resolution of 960 by 540. The footage was taken while in a moving vehicle, for some added difficulty. Composited over top of the eye is a false retina, which has been animated to match the combined movement of the camera, my head, and my eye. Now that the eye has been tracked I can make any changes or additions to the eye that I want, given some time and effort.

The basic layout I used while working on the Eye Test.

In this example, I created a circular psuedo sphere and placed it over the eye to simulate a retina, then tracked it to the outline of my real retina throughout almost every frame. While the effect is largely imperfect up close, when the video is rendered out to about half the full resolution it doesn’t look bad at all. With a lot of nitpicking and optimization, the hand tracking could come very close to approximating the true movement of the eye.

While animating the false retina, I also created two shapes that would loosely match the eyelids, so that I could make the retina disappear realistically when I close my eye. I did the same thing for a few frames near the end of the video, as my finger covered the view of my eye.

Though the last thing to really mention in this post, one of the first things I did was set up the compositing nodes, as this was done on the remainder of the car ride. I had to fiddle around at first, getting used to how they worked, but in the end the node setup looked something like in the picture posted above.

The movie images were fed in sequence after being exported from iMovie, and connected to an alpha over of the 3D Blender scene after it went through a blur filter. The end effect looked something like this.

Cheers!

–Lace

All models and pictures are, of course, copyright IzationLabs.

Do you have any ideas for interesting items you would like to see modeled in 3D? Drop me a line on the IZL ScratchSpace, I’m always in need of attention getting objects that need to be ‘digitized’.

More to come.

–Lace

Ambient Occlusion simulates the way light travels and bounces off of objects, especially objects that aren’t meant to be reflective. Describing it would be well and good, but I am a firm believer in visual learning. So instead, here are some video examples.

The first video shows a basic cube, with the inner faces extruded inward to give it some depth, as well as an interesting little ‘nub’ on top. Ambient Occlusion has not been activated, it is a simple render with simple lighting.

This next video is of the same cube, but with a well lit Ambient Occlusion pass. Notice how much more realistic it looks?

Here’s the only problem with Ambient Occlusion. Real time AO is extremely resource intensive. Running the spinning cube animation with real time Ambient Occlusion in the Blender game engine is impossible for all intents and purposes. So does that mean we are stuck with unrealistic boxes in our games? No! If they can make it look good in commercial games, we can do it too.

Baking. Not cookies or cakes, come on now. We are talking about Ambient Occlusion baking. We take the cube, and break it down into a flat image made up of it’s faces. We then tell Blender to render the Ambient Occlusion not onto the cube, but onto the flat picture we just made. THEN we re-apply that picture to the cube, so that the faces in the picture match back up to the faces on the cube. Next thing we know, we’ve taken the look and visual qualities of Ambient Occlusion and, in a sense, painted it on to the cube just like we would colors or other images.

Baking the AO onto the cube let’s us do real time animations that look practically as good as the original, resource intensive AO. This video shows a baked form of AO that has been tweaked for even better lighting and shading.

That lets us do cool things like this in the game engine!

To see for yourself that the cube animation really does run in the game engine (in real time), go ahead and download the blend file used for this post here. When it opens just hit ‘p’ and watch that cube spin it’s heart out!

For more info on Ambient Occlusions, just check out it’s Wikipedia entry.

Blend on!

–Lace