IZation Labs

Sleep comes easier for me now that I’ve started up my most recent caffeine ban, but that won’t stop me from adding a few newish photos

I’m finally starting to generate some images and content that I feel I can be proud of. Things that aren’t exactly out of this world, but are also good enough to not get comments like ‘Dude. Is that supposed to be a car or a bird?”

I honestly believe in using whatever tools best suit you. Much of what you see here is generated in Blender, unless I mention otherwise. I’m just a Blenderhead, through and through. I’ve a professor who knowingly joked that if I thought I could get away with it, I would do all of my modeling in Blender and just import it as a .obj into 3ds Max for the 3ds based Studio 1 class in which I’m currently enrolled. The class erupted into laughter, myself included, mostly because we all know that he is perfectly correct.

The two new uploads for the evening have got a few weeks on them now, but they include a textured football and football helmet. These were given to us as models and we were to texture them in 3ds Max. Enjoy!

-Lace

Finals are looming, with the first final projects due next week. I’ve been busy working away in 3ds Max, Inventor, Blender, and Final Cut, but I’ve neglected my posting ‘duties’ in the process. Apologies!

This year I was asked to be part of an Undergraduate Symposium along with a fellow classmate of mine, Gary Tatrow. The Symposium was to focus on something I was already getting into in my independent study. The goal was to create a quality sports graphic using the equipment we had on hand to demonstrate what students in the SAG program at Eastern Michigan University are capable of, as well as to start the process of developing the workflow required to create our sports team’s graphics in house.

The following video shows a breakdown of the different components and how they were laid together. All in all it was a very interesting experience, one that I would be happy to do again next year.

-Lace

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

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

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

For one of my SAG (that’s Simulation, Animation, and Gaming) classes this semester I had to create a flash animation based on a child’s fairy tale story. The story I randomly chose was named ‘The Three Feathers’. After picking it we wrote out a basic synopsis of the story, did some character drawings and storyboards, and set to work. We had much more than a month to do it. I waited until I had a little less than 2 days worth of ‘time’ until the submission cut off, then got to work. First, I worked on the backgrounds. (Click the images below to make them larger.)

The evening before the project was due, I realized that I had managed to nearly overachieve myself into oblivion. I had made it too long, too clunky, and had high goals and aspirations that my talents in Adobe CS4 wouldn’t allow me to reach. In my mind, the project had been set up and planned like the ReElect the Dead film we created last summer. In the depths of my mind, I had known that was a bad idea. The next thing I worked on was the script and music.

I resolved that I would not sleep until it was finished, or finished enough to show in class. I animated. I fiddled with the software, trying to understand the keyframes and motion tweens. Trying most of all to figure out how to sync the audio track to the animation itself.

I did not sleep that night.

At 11:45 the following morning a haggard, bearded, dead exhausted man was sitting at his desk, sighing at his unfinished work (unfinished as far as personal standards are concerned) and packing up his gear, ready to head to his noon class.

Click here to read the rest and watch the final animation

After following a fantastic tutorial by Jonathan Williamson (no relation) I put together this rough animation of a working piston. All of the modeling, animation, and rendering was done using just Blender.

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