IZation Labs

Below is a quick render of a military missile I’m working on for a new project. It was made in Blender 2.53, and is a first foray into UV texture unwrapping and mapping in the newest version of Blender. A few more adjustments are all that’s needed and I’ll be starting on some other aspects of the required scene. References images and concepts were found via a Google image search.

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-Lace

An elegant forum solution has finally been selected, and the new forums can be accessed by clicking the link titled ‘Forum‘ at the top of this page. Head that way if you have questions about IZation Labs, College-Now, PBLs, or even if you just want to shoot the breeze and bump brains for a little while.

-Lace

Just a brief update to any would be viewers;

I spent a few hours at the Kehoe center in Shelby today meeting the newest College-Now students and speaking to them about technology, all of which went very well, I’m excited to get to know and work with these new ‘eager young minds’.

Following the line of CNC machines, below is a video of a machine called the RepRap, a diy fabricated 3D printer that is capable of, for all intents and purposes, printing copies of itself. Just like how the CNC Router I posted in the last is now being used to machine parts for a similar albeit much larger machine, the RepRap  is a machine that can build itself. Neat, huh?

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-Lace

At the beginning of this year, which means a solid seven months ago at the time of writing this, I found myself fueling the flames of a curious interest in CNC machines. CNC, or Computed Numerically Controlled or some variation of the same, is just a fancy way of saying a machine that does some kind of job, and is controlled using a computer. CNC machines can be found in lots of factories and assembly lines. If you have ever visited a factory of any kind or even watched many ‘how its made’ videos, you are sure to have seen some kind of CNC machine. CNC does not refer to any single kind of machine, but to the control system that many machines can have. Lathes, routers, mills, plotters, robotic arms, all kinds of equipment can fall into the realm of CNC. The simplest example is a standard desktop printer:

Type a letter. Click print. Assuming you haven’t let the ink cartridge run out (as I so often do) and you’ve kept the paper tray refreshed (as I so often don’t), in a matter of seconds you will have a sheet of paper with your letter printed out, ready to be used for whatever purpose it was intended. That printer is a kind of CNC machine.

Inside the printer are belts, screws, motors, and some kind of ‘tool’, in this case a form of print head. The computer sends signals to the printer to move motor y, which feeds paper through the machine in a very accurate, measured manner. Another motor (x) receives the signal to start moving the print head back and forth across the page as the paper is fed through the printer. The print head is also receiving a signal to deposit ink. Moments later, the ink has been deposited onto the page with the proper accuracy and you are looking at very precise, quality text, assuming your printer has been built in the past decade or so.

While printers are interesting, I already had one that kind of works, and ten more sitting in my shop in my giant parts bin, so what was the next logical step above ‘printer’? Well. CNC router is what I decided, logic be darned.

A week or two after deciding I wanted to built a CNC router, which is a machine that controls wood working tools using a computer, I bounced the idea off of fellow College-Now graduate of 2008 Clifford Green, who jumped on the bandwagon as well. We decided to split the cost in half, and over the following seven months we talked, planned, purchased, soldered, cut, drilled, routed, assembled, and nearly every other project related verb that applies. Pictured to the left is the final product.

We named it Takun, because both of us are big FLCL fans. It’s our brand new home made CNC router. It is incredibly accurate and so far extremely useful. In the month or so that we have had it running, it has already surpassed my expectations by far. Clifford and I were able to build it for  half the price of a production machine, if not less. We made up for that money saved in effort, however. Together, we calculated the complete build time was very close to 120 man hours, so it goes without saying that we spent what little time both our schedules were free working out in the workshop until the early hours of more than one morning.

The original design can be found here. All of the wood was cut by hand, no CNC machines were used in the production of Takun. For anyone interested, the x and y resolution is a supposed 1/2000 of an inch. For a home made piece of equipment running, at the moment, a Dremel with a carbide bit as its tooling, this thing is quite the amazing machine. Below is a time lapse video of a sign being cut out by the machine, and following that is the image gallery, with some build images and final pictures of the machine, as well as photos of other items we have made so far.

Click any of the images to see them full size. Feel free to leave any questions or comments, and if you liked the article, don’t forget to subscribe!

-Lace

Though it took a long time working on it here and there between work and my other projects, I have recently finished a more professional, more finalized special effects test. I learn a great deal every time I tackle another piece, and I think it shows in the final product as compared to my last test. All rendering, design, and compositing of 3D elements was done in Blender, the camera tracking was done using Syntheyes, and the video editing using Final Cut Express.

(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

With the shelling out of some decent dinero and about six hours of effort, I have here for the entertainment of all up and coming VFX enthusiasts a camera tracking test. If you are looking for bright lights, action, and large explosions… well you may be disappointed, this is just a test, there’s nothing too fancy about it, visually. The key focus was the tracking of a CG item to handheld video footage, and it turned out well for a first attempt.

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

Have you ever wanted to be able to melt down your scrap metal and make new and useful things with them? Well I know I have for a few months now, ever since looking over some books in my Lindsay magazine I receive every once in a while!

Alright, let’s switch to a more natural, less Billy Mays kind of voice. Over the past few months I’ve spent some time looking at my Lindsay magazines, which are basically catalogs of old technical books that have been reprinted. Many times I saw things about home made blast furnaces, but it wasn’t until I connected it to another project that a friend (and fellow College-Now graduate) and I are working on that it really clicked for me. ‘This is something I want to try.’

Forty dollars later, I had a fully functional, reusable high temperature furnace that can be used to process anything with a melting point below 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. To sum it up in a few words: Very fun. Very dangerous. (Which may be part of the fun.)

The basic idea is this: charcoal and aluminium scrap (such as soda cans) go in, and ingots come out. It’s not quite that simple, but you get the idea. The charcoal, contained by the concrete of the furnace, heats the aluminium scrap to its melting point. The reason it can acheive the required temperatures that the furnace forces a large volume of air into the core where the charcoal is contained. Enough scrap, and the molten aluminum can be poured out of its high temperature crucible and into a muffin tin. Once it cools, you have a nice chunk of aluminium stock that can be re-melted later when you are ready to shape it into something a bit more useful.

I can’t take all the credit for the design. I did some research, followed some instructions for a basic design online, and made my own changes. I’ve also made a few changes of my own since first building it. So far my record is five solid ingots in two hours and fifteen minutes, with each ingot taking somewhere between thirty and fifty cans to make.

If anyone is interested in a quality how-to concerning constructing your own (or some help making your own, if you live around northeast Ohio) let me know via the contact page and I’ll write something up. Below are some construction photos, as well as some examples of the quality of metal that I end up with. They are all hi-res, so it may take some time for them to load on a slow connection.

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-Lace