IZation Labs

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

‘roB’ is a robot character I made for a short film at Eastern Michigan University. He’s a spunky little bot with a get up and get it done kind of attitude, and he can often be seen hanging out on my desk.

Okay, so not really. This a special effects test involving matchmoving and compositing courtesy of Syntheyes and Blender. It is a shot I’m quite fond of, and it even has a special effects breakdown to show the ‘steps’ taken to go from raw footage to final composite. I think the visual effects breakdown took as much time as the tracking and compositing work itself.

The raw image sequence was processed using supervised tracking in Syntheyes, meaning that each bright green triangular point shown in the video I actually supervised the manual tracking of from frame to frame. Time consuming? Yes. But look at the results! How cool is that?

Of course, my trusty Blender came through for me on all of the 3D aspects. Modeling, lighting, rendering, and compositing were all handled by this powerful beast of a 3D package. If you haven’t looked into it yet, really, what are you waiting for?

-Lace

As a result of procrastinating all day (for those of you still in school, don’t try procrastination at home, I’m a trained professional) instead of getting to work on assignments, I decided to start work on a nice little robot character I found in one of my sketchbooks from a year or two ago. It’s too late to continue on him now, but here is an image of the work in progress with some random rust textures affixed. He has no legs, feet, or manipulators on his arms, and there’s still plenty to do, but he is shaping up to be a good looking little rust bucket.

Note, the trapezoid on his chest will eventually have button-like rivets along the outer edge, much like aviator jackets of old. He is to be a steampunk robot (one of the best kinds there is).

-Lace

While for the most part my colleagues and classmates in the field of what can be summed up as (and heavily understated by the words) ’3D Animation’ are supportive of new experiences, new software, etc, occasionally work that I have done is overshadowed for someone by the fact that I did not produce it using a ‘socially accepted’ software package such as 3DS Max or Maya. I am, of course, referring to my preferred package, my swiss army knife in a world of 3D, Blender.

The fact of the matter is, I have never seen any package commonly ‘recognized’ to be superior produce anything that Blender could not. In fact, I often see quite the opposite, in that few packages are as capable in reference to the multitude of features in which Blender dominates. What else can do particle simulation, volumetric smoke and fire, water, soft bodies, modeling, rigging, animating, texturing, and real world physics simulations all in the same package? Show me the money, folks.

I’m not necessarily saying that other packages are less capable, nor that Blender is the end all be all for every 3D user in the world. What I am saying is this; when you see a truly quality example of someone’s work, something they put a great deal of time and effort into perfecting to perfection, by all means ask how it was done and with what package. Compliment it if it truly shines, suggest better ways of doing things, compare pros and cons, and develop a unique and meaningful conversation or critique. What better way to learn?

But please. Please, refrain from changing your mind on the quality of craftsmanship just because it wasn’t made with an Autodesk product. It can leave a bad taste in both of your mouths, and may make you seem uninformed. By writing something off just because that high school computer science teacher you had said that it wasn’t worth a nickel of your time, you risk missing out on a tremendous number of opportunities! You might learn something new if you give yourself a chance to open up to it. Of course, that lesson can be applied to a lot of things in life, not just 3D modeling and animating application wars.

:p

Now that the render I’ve been waiting on is done, I can stop pseudo-ranting and get to the interesting part of the post. I spent all afternoon and evening today working in Syntheyes and Blender. The included short fifty frame video marks a number of firsts for me.

Into SynthEyes went the image sequence, (video footage broken into a separate image for each frame). SynthEyes is a software package that, to put it roughly, determines how cameras and objects move based on video footage so that we can further manipulate them in software like Blender. It’s one of the things that lets us add special effects. Then came an hour or two of supervised tracking, a first for me, as in the past I have used SynthEyes’ built in autotracking functions to automatically track my footage.

This time, not only did I track the movement of the camera using supervised tracking, but I also tracked a moving object in the footage, a vehicle driving down the road. After the tracking was done and the data was exported to Blender, I began playing with the idea of testing the footage by attached something to the side of the truck.

After a few hours of fiddling, the final product now arises. It’s a short (nearly two whole seconds) technical test slash learning experience comprised of a truck moving down the highway with an image of the TRON style spheres pasted realistically to its side. Not only is the truck moving, but the handheld camera is swiveling in a tripod like manner to track the truck as it moves along the road.

This may look pretty basic, and in some respects it is, but it is one of the most difficult hurdles in achieving realistic special effects and photoreal 3D additions to live action film. And jumping those hurdles can be a lot of fun.

-Lace

PS. Bonus points if you noticed Suzanne.

Well, I’ve accumulated enough photos to do a decent photo post, so here it is, enjoy. Clicking on any of the photos should bring them up full size.

Above is a mockup of a simple website I made in Photoshop for a final lab last semester. There was no focus on web design throughout the course, the lab just had to show our proficiency with the tools that we had learned, and so could be a website, a video game interface, or anything similar, really. The images in the mockup are all examples of my own work as they relate to the ‘purpose’ of the website.

This one was from fiddling around in the beginning of December. Nothing too special here, just some flat Christmas tree shapes that I made in Blender and then duplicated and rotate to make trees. Then the trees were copied and moved about the snowy scene that I created. This was, basically, the result of fiddling around while in a computer graphics course while covering ‘vectors’.

This one may seem familiar, as there was a video of it in the final post from 2010. This hand gun was modeled, textured, and animated for the same class that I doodled the Christmas tree setting in. It was overkill for the project, as all that had to be shown was proficiency in manipulating entities through a timeline to create an animation. Something as simple as a 2D basketball shot through a hoop a few times would have sufficed.

This one was for the same Photoshop class as the first image. It is a composite of three seperate images. The first was of myself holding up the hammer against a different white background. The second was a photo of the barn wall with a nail driven into it. The third and final was a closeup of the subject’s head (my father). He was instructed: ‘look like someone is about to bash you in the head with a hammer’. He did a splendiferous job.

The final image of this dump was rendered just hours before this post was made to the site. I followed a Blender tutorial at BlenderCookie to make the glowing light effect, then added the TRON logo for kicks. This image is now the background on my larger monitor. Feel free to copy it and use it if you like it. I think I’ll do more with this scene and effect in the future.

-Lace

So this Christmas, just as most more recent Christmi (that’s plural for Christmas, by the way. No, really.) I did a bit of woodworking out in the shop. Unlike the past few years, this Christmas season I had my 2010 CNC router at my disposal and decided to design and manufacture some gifts which otherwise would have been beyond my skills as a craftsman. Of course, there were some speed bumps along the way, but eventually everything came together.

This old kitchen counter top (our shop used to be apartments) was torn out and rebuilt. It makes a perfect home for our CNC.

A month or two ago my CNC router was finally relocated to it’s semi permanent home in a dedicated CNC room of the shop (more importantly, off of my father’s main workbench). Fast forward to the final days of exams here at Eastern Michigan, around the 15th of December and I had begun sketching out a rough version of a vertical gun rack for a cousin of mine who recently received his first BB gun. A few minutes of modeling in CAD and setting up proper toolpaths later and the different components were lines of code just waiting to be transformed into a beautiful Christmas gift.

Around the 20th or so I started fabrication of the gun rack, while simultaneously designing some name plates for my sister’s two horses and, as a bit of a gag, one for my father’s angus as well. All went well until the last set of gun rack parts was to be manufactured. The machine kept ‘glitching’, for lack of a better explanation at the time. After ruining two or three pieces of perfectly good raw material, I finally figured out what was wrong. The aluminum coupler between the gantry stepper motor and a through rod was not tight enough and was slipping instead of turning the way it was meant to.

All I should have had to do was tighten up one set screw to temporarily fix it. It turns out, however, that when we originally built the machine we didn’t grind a flat spot for the set screw to bite into. That we used a threaded rod inside continues to confound me, my guess is that it is all we had on hand. The fact that the machine had operated accurately for even this long surprised me. To fix this problem, I had to tear down at least a third of the machine to get to the rod, grind it, and reattach the motor shaft properly.

Three hours later, (around midnight) the machine was back in operation. It was too late to keep working, I would continue the following day. Sleep deprivation and high speed cutting tools don’t mix well.

When the parts for the gun rack had finished machining, I started working on the three signs I had planned to make. They read ‘Bailey’, ‘Danny’, and ‘Mac’. Mac is the angus, named after the respective fast food burger. While the signs were being machined, I began the assembly (read as ‘gluing and clamping’) of the gun rack.

The sign making went relatively smoothly, although a failure of motor function (my own, not the machine’s) meant I needed a band aid on one or two fingers before Christmas eve had arrived. You can see a few of the steps above, from machining the actual signs from cherry to clear coating, painting, then sanding and clear coating again to get the black inlaid text effect.

Pictured above is the gun rack as it exists in its final form. It is meant to be mounted vertically with the butt of the BB gun resting in the inset portion of the top of the box, and its barrel poking up through a hole at the top. The box can be used to store BB’s and small targets, or anything else that will fit inside it.

Last but not least, the evening before returning to school I managed to get my hands on a piece of what I believe to be some kind of Plexiglas and wanted to machine it. Having no idea what to design, and having just rekindled my already fierce love for all things ‘Back to the Future’ (copyright Universal, I’m not profiting from this, yada, yada) by purchasing the new BTTF video game, I decided that a quick flux capacitor would make for a clean yet easy quick project. The phrase ‘All I’ve got is time’ was simply the first thing that came to mind. Twenty minutes later and I was on my way out to the shop.

I had never machined plexi before. First thing I realized; Yep. That’s much harder than wood. Next time, multiple small passes at a slower feed rate. Second thing I realized; plexi makes a MESS. I will be installing a chip collection system before I machine much more Plexiglas. Overall I was relatively pleased with it, however, and plan to do more in the future (har har).

Let me know what you think, and as always, if you like what you read here feel free to Subscribe to Posts with the link at the top of this page.

-Lace

Finals are winding down and Christmas season can finally become the focal point of this student’s attention. It’s been a long few months, but that’s one more semester down and three more to go. I’ve finished two decently large projects for school this semester, including a semi real rendering and animation of the PK380 sidearm and a short (three minute) film about a robot who has to save the day. The former can be viewed in this post. The latter I think I’ll clean up a bit more before I release it to the world.

Hey, you Buckeye Central students. I’ll be seeing you soon! In case I don’t post again before the day arrives, Merry Christmas!

-Lace