Team 1986 Safety Animation 2010

I never did put this up, did I? Well, this was my first animation done for an annual safety animation contest sponsored by Autodesk. I have no clue how well it did, but it didn't win. On the bright side, the judges didn't complain! Anyway, it was rendered in 3ds Max, and most of the models were from Turbosquid or our team. Of course, the compiling/compositing of the movie was done in Movie Maker, but it turned out all right. The guy was actually just a biped preset from 3ds Max, and was pretty easy to edit materials on (that's our team shirt colors for the most part). It's short, and not much animation actually happened (a total of about 5 seconds), but I had a 40 second time limit including credits, so I had to watch out for that.

A Game Project!

Hey, there! I haven't posted anything in a while, but I thought I'd break news on this game I've been working on. It may or may not go commercial (if it does it'll be $1 or free... or I'll expand the idea!), but here's a working demo for now. It works pretty well, just read the "Controls and Info" text document before playing. And unzip the file before playing - that can cause problems if you don't.

Download the .zip from here to try it! Once downloaded, be sure to un-zip, then select the RunGame.exe file to play. I recommend reading the "Controls and Info" text document first to get an idea of how the game works.

Playground at the Showroom Floor!

Or something like that. Either way, you don't normally see playgrounds on reflective surfaces. This cool playground was modeled and assembled in Inventor 2010, and rendered with Inventor Studio. Complete with Global Illumination and soft shadows. Rendered at 1440x1080 for the heck of it, the image took about an hour on my Core i5-430M. Not bad, really.
The playground was originally created for a school project, but, because I love making stuff look awesome, I took the project a step further by creating a nifty rendering:

Pretty neat, and quite realistic, especially for Inventor Studio.

The First Entry, Part 2

Well, it seems I didn't get around to updating as soon as I'd have liked to...
Here it goes, in that case.

Here we have some awesome stereoscopic 3D glasses. Mainly a test on blurred transparency, and on how colored transparent shadows looked. Turns out, it looks pretty cool! Based of a pair I received from "5" gum as an advertisement for a new flavor. Playing TrackMania Nations is much more fun now.

And a minigun! Not sure what I'm going to use it for, but it does look pretty cool. Basically just cylinders for the shapes, no real modeling, except for the handle. As for how to animate it, I'm not sure yet, since I do plan for it to be used in-game. And since miniguns take a sec to warm up, the animation has to play into the programming, not just the art...

This was a cool fluid simulation I tried out, using Blender 2.5a2. The speed of simulations and rendering has increased greatly, cutting one scene I had down from 40 seconds per frame to 9 seconds per frame rendering time. I didn't do a comparison with the simulation times, but it sure seemed faster. Soon Blender 2.5 will be receiving a better fluid simulator, which will allow the use of multiple fluid interactions (right now it is limited to one fluid per scene).

An awesome little "Lava Blob!" Originally, it didn't have eyes, but after a while I decided to add them. A test of directional light atmospheric effects in Blender, and of a fractal texture, which worked quite well. The shape was made with a softbody icosphere and messed with a little bit using a fractal subdivision tool.

That's all for now, and these seven pictures make up pretty much all non-realtime works I have saved. Unfortunately, I don't save renders of several projects I do, but I've started to get more in the habit of that.

The First Entry

Welcome! If I get around to regularly updating this, the blog you are currently viewing will be the place I update all my 3D (or 2D from time to time) art and such. Whether it be CAD renderings, artistic designs, pieces of a current game, or something else, it will be posted on here.

Except for some of the game stuff... If I decide to really try and sell it, you'll probably only see promotions...

In the first few of these posts will be projects that have been anywhere from a year to a week old, since I haven't actually put anything up here yet, nor was this blog in existence at the time of their creations. I'll probably end up limiting it to only one picture per post, but for now, I'll do two or three, since I'm starting out.

So to start, we have:

A several month old rendering I did for my school's robotics team. This was the gameplay field for the year's game (it changes every year), involving what was essentially robotic soccer, but with bumps and hanging robots.

Next up... (in no particular order)

A man which I was doing a few tests with. It's not my model, all credit to Jonathan Williamson for that part. But I set up the materials a bit more, using SSS for his skin, and some other more basic shaders for the shirt, socks, and shorts. I modified the lighting setup a bit, but for the most part that was also done by Jonathan. I also messed with cloth simulations for the shirt and shorts (and maybe the socks, although I can't remember that for sure), which made them look more realistic than they originally did.

And then...

A glass monkey head! Mainly just a test; the model is a preset in Blender 3D. (synonymous to the teapot primitive found in other modeling softwares) I was messing around with combined reflection and refraction, and came up with this. Also some very soft shadows that I messed with. The mouth was modified a bit for an extra-large grin.

And there you are! The first ever post of An Extra Dimension!

Now that you've read it all, feel free to comment any suggestions for improvement on my work. I would highly appreciate the criticism!