Open Sourcing

have shifted my focus recently from modeling to materials, texturing, and general scene management. The image at the right is my first attempt with adding decals to my F1 car. They don't look too bad actually. I have some more design work to do with them, mainly making them look more f1-ish, but the hard part of getting them to mesh with my existing node based car paint is done!

Next came the process of adding my star background to my scene. You can see my progress so far on the left. All the pieces were made in blender and stuck together with Gimp. Right now it sort of looks like the asphalt is the end of the world and it falls off into oblivion, but I have yet to figure out exactly what I want to put over there. I like the way the moon and the stars came out though. The nebula gives it that sort of futuristic/other-worldly look.

I also thought I may share with you my initial sketch for the Blender F1 scene. I think I originally though some fire extinguishers would look good in the right hand corner, but I like it empty right now.

Finally, I'll leave you with a few doodles and fun sketches that I've done recently. I like the way this last character is turning out, so he may be my next modeling challenge! (Sorry for bad scan quality)

esterday was a snow day! We had a hefty 8 inches here in Wilmington, so I had plenty of time for some blendering and painting with the tablet.

The first update is an updated Cephy model. I remade the body using a much cleaner, low poly mesh. It should deform very well while animating and should render fairly quick as well. The last thing to finish up on the model is the mouth and eye/eyelids.

The next thing that I took on this past weekend was to try my hand out at some texturing (see picture on left, please click for bigger image). I used just the hand off of the Cephy model and painted out a normal map and color map in Gimp. UV unwrapping the hand mesh was fairly straight forward, so I'll skip that step. I first painted in the wrinkles around the knuckles (the tablet made this a lot easier than it would have been!) and then added a black and white image of leather to add the pores. This completed my normal and specular map.

The next step was a color map. I mainly just painted flat colors out for a color map, but I also added a colorized picture of a piece of old bark to give it some detail. The palm didn't come out as well as the back of the hand, but I think that's mainly because I'm still learning how to paint wrinkles. It's not as easy as it seems!

I also got a chance to practice some painting yesterday. The image below is my attempt at doing some digital painting. I'm learning a lot with the new tablet and I'm definitely improving from the first car painting. This painting took about an hour and is based on the techniques from ImagineFX.

am going to be skipping around a lot today, so bear with me! First off, I love my tablet! I have been playing around a little bit more with Inkscape and vector designs as it is a lot easier to do this with the Wacom. I hope to have a nice completed vector design up in a little while. Secondly, my fiancee and I tried our hands at making some t-shirts last weekend. We enjoy doing little projects together and as a Valentine's Day present I gathered up some supplies and we made our own "vintage" looking t-shirts.

The process was quite fun actually and is sort of a hand made screening process. Basically what you do is create a design (see the image to the right for my quick "on the plane" sketches) and transfer the design to a light fabric. I went with a skewy bike gear and she ended up going with a winged track foot for our designs. We used an old pair of spandex tights, but pantyhose or a very thin curtain material would work as well. Then you create a template of the design by painting with glue on the areas that you wish to not receive paint. After the glue dries you simply paint on the t-shirt, through the template and you are left with your design. Painting through the fabric gives the resulting t-shirt image a worn out or vintage look. You can also use the template more than once if you want to make shirts for a number of different people. Take a look, I think it came out pretty well! (please excuse the grainy cell phone picture)

My next bit of jumping around is playing with some photo editing. I wanted to do some really impressive editing, not just cleaning a photo up, so I set out to try my hand at manipulating a face. I took the original picture from this post and used some stock images of tribal graphics, architectural moldings, and clouds to come up with the following:

I really like the way this last one came out. There is plenty more cleaning up that could be done to it, but I think it looks fairly good. I found the iWarp tool in Gimp which really helped to make it look like the graphics were against the face and not floating above it like the previous image.

ast week was my birthday and I received a new Wacom Bamboo tablet as a gift! I've never used a tablet before and was quite excited to try it, so I quickly got it all set up and sketched a quick picture of my car. It's obviously not perfect and would need quite a bit more work in order to make it a finished piece, but it allowed me to test out the tablet, which works great! I'm not sure how I ever got by without it actually. It took me a while to get used to it, but the pressure sensitivity is fantastic for painting in Gimp. I can't wait to try some texture painting with it!

Also last week I did a quick render on my hand with some particle clouds I've been tinkering around with. The idea behind the render is that some sort of alien is behind some laboratory glass and something goes wrong in the room causing a ruckus and the only thing that the observers on the outside of the lab see is an alien hand coming up against the glass! Scary!

fter a long holiday break, I have a large amount of updates! First things first, I re-made the rig for Marty the robot. The feet, hands, and hips were all changed, so it's quite different. These are some of my notes along with a snapshot of the complete rig.

With a new rig it obviously meant that I had to make a new walk cycle. This was good animation practice for me, but I'm not as happy with it as the last one. I could have continued to tweak it, but I'm going to call it done for now. Enjoy!

Next, I played around with a python script called Blender Mechanical Gears, which is pretty fun. The script creates a single tooth of a gear, which you then have to spindup around it's center point to create a full gear. This one was rendered in Yafray, with the texture created in Gimp. I think it came out really well!

he basic bones for my Marty rig are completed now and to test him out I gave him a little Macbeth pose. I ran across just a few things that I'll most likely end up changing. The first thing is that his shoulders are pretty limited on how far they can move without intersecting the body mesh. I'll probably end up making the shoulder hole a bit bigger and changing the pivot point for the upper arm bone to try to fix this a bit. Otherwise he'll be running around with really wide arms all the time! The second thing I'll have to play around with is sort of a basic way to move all his bones at once. I created his rig without following any tutorials or notes (which I'm excited about!) and I forgot to add a root, or master bone. This sounds like it should be easy, but I was running into some troubles with parenting what to what and leaving some bones behind when grabbing and moving the whole armature.

The next couple of pictures were just some photos that I had on my computer that I decided to play with in Gimp. They were both taken last year at the Cherry Blossom festival in Washington, DC. This one on the left was meant to look like an old vintage photo that has been lying around for many years. Increasing the contrast a bit, along with adjusting the color curves gives it that worn look and then I just added some fading to black in the corners.

The photo below I think came out pretty well and really looks like the result I was hoping for. This one was made to look like a still image from a scene in a movie (if you click on it you'll see a bigger version). Enjoy!

quick Christmas wish to get you in the spirit of the season! Made quickly in Gimp last night, enjoy!

I'm just getting back into the swing of things after a few week business trip to the UK. Captain Blender is coming along nicely and I should be adding the materials, textures, and hair in the next few days. I cheated a little bit with the modelling and skipped ahead by grabbing the files off of the DVD accompanying the book, but I don't feel too bad about it. I did originally get the book to do some animation and all I've done so far is model! I'm excited about the next rigging part though. I should also be able to do some work with the new 2.46 Blender version with his hair. We'll see how everything turns out, but will update soon!

I've always been interested in computer graphics. I think this stems from my interest in traditional art (drawing and photography) and my interest in technology and computers. I recently started to do some web design and stumbled across/discovered the open source program GIMP.

GIMP is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is an open source, freely distributed image program (think adobe photoshop). The program is incredible in what it can do and if you have any interests at all in touching up photos or other computer artwork I encourage you to check out their site and the program itself. GIMP and the online community surrounding it offers a huge number of tutorials for all skill levels and I got in to learning about the program through these documents.

I began to play with some pictures that I had taken (I also enjoy photography) and came up with a number of nice images:






This image was taken at Shenandoah National Park during my girlfriend and I's hiking expedition last summer. I really like the effect of a color area in a black and white picture.

This is a quick snapshot of one of my bikes (biking is somewhat of an obsession of mine). Along with the selective colorization, I also added some patterned text with a shadow.