Sunday, 20 of May of 2012
Exploring Tech and Life as they Intertwine
Being rather busy here at EMU I haven’t been able to put as much free time as I would like into my 3D work, though that isn’t to say I haven’t been creative. Here are a few items I’ve been working on, all of them for fun and experience.
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
There’s an extremely well written book, one of my personal favorites, entitled “Prey“. The author, Michael Crichton, passed away not too long ago, but he is the well known author of books such as The Terminal Man, Congo, Timeline, Airframe, and Jurassic Park. His book Prey focuses on nanotechnology and evolution, which, since reading the book, has strongly drawn my attention.
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
Finding myself trapped at a service station for quite literally six hours straight the other day, I spent my time wisely, modeling and sketching with the Discovery Channel on in the background. After about an hours worth of time, I had modeled a fairly detailed, realistic looking air cannon, the design of which I had sketched out a few days prior. The cannon, when built, would be just over a foot and a half long, and is meant to be worn on the top of the forearm. The PVC rail that wraps around the arm is not pressurized, but is connected to the cannon in multiple places to help ward off stress fractures that would otherwise make the cannon unsafe to wear.
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.
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”.
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.
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