IZation Labs

Here is a short video I made a few weeks ago that grew out of a tutorial I was following to make ‘plants’ grow. I also made use of Blender’s built in Python camera changing script for the first time. There are some problems with the frame switching between shots that I need to figure out, but I felt this render was good enough to post.

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

While examining some ‘lifter’ videos on youtube, I came across this curious mockup of a device in the related video section. It’s dubbed the SEG, or a Searl Effect Generator. The device has the attention of many free-energy communities, but Searl says that his last working SEG was confiscated, so there’s no actual proof the device or concept work as described.

This mockup is powered externally, and only demonstrates how the actual device ‘should’ function. The video of the mockup itself is interesting enough from an electro-mechanical perspective to warrant a post. Whether or not the actual device would work… The jury’s still out.

Cool, huh? For more info, check out the wiki article.

–Lace

Ambient Occlusion: a somewhat resource intensive way to make things just look better. If you’ve ever visited the Blender Artist forums, you’ll see people posting models that they have put their hearts and souls into for weeks, months, even years! Often you will see multiple comments below the first pictures blasting something along the lines of “TURN ON AO”!

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.

Click here to see the rest!

Today’s post is a double whammy. Not only did I find a nice old animation of water falling into a ceramic bowl that I have never posted on IZL, but I decided to post it without going through Youtube, Vimeo, or any external hosting site! Great thanks go out to the mac-dev.net for creating such a nicely little flash video player plugin for WordPress! So here it is, in all it’s glory. The first totally independent IZationLabs video.

–Lace

Made a new short SFX clip today named “Jump Stunt”. It took about three and a half to four hours to make. The final cut turned out better than I expected. If you’ve seen the movie Jumper, then you can probably guess where my inspiration came from.

You can also tell that I’m not the best actor, but hey, it’s not easy when you have to be the camera man and the guy who jumps off the porch 10 times in a row to get the right shot! That kind of thing can leave you a little disoriented..

Looking around over at Trossen Robotics today, I noticed the end of the August TRC Project has some extremely interesting entries. After some intense link-clicking, I found myself at the iC Hexapod site. Before I say anything else, watch this video.

Amazing, huh?

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