So thrilled.

-Lace

Graduation cometh, and verily, in 13 days I shall walk, or die trying.

On to the fun! The small CNC Router we built a few years ago at IZation Labs is still kicking! It was used to make around 20 Wine Glass Holders for Christmas Gifts this past year. The following video shows the basic process from start to finish.

Yes. I do need to get more sleep.

-Lace

The render to the left is the original output of the scene that I only recently finished. Up late watching viral videos and playing video games one night with some friends I don’t get to spend enough time with, one of them showed interest in seeing what Blender is capable of, as he hasn’t been actively following the newest (earth shattering) updates. So, being on a video game kick, I modeled him some nine millimeter cartridges at about three that morning.

Never one to leave a sleeping model lie, I came back to the file about a month later while cleaning up my main Blender project directory and felt like the scene could be so much more, could be more full bodied and realistic. This lead me to create the Copperpot Munitions LLC  box of 9mm cartridges. Then I duplicated a single 9mm round 100 times or so and used the physics engine to drop them into the box and scatter them about the scene.

I’m very happy with the final product, my only regret is that the cartridges could look just a bit grungier in my opinion. To see the texture used for the box art, head over to my portfolio.

On a side note, here’s a shameless plug, just in case anyone isn’t already using the software package “Dropbox”. It completely replaced my flash drive for school and projects, and it keeps my data backed up and updated to the newest revisions on all my computers.

Dropbox is a program that creates a normal folder on your computer, conveniently called a “Dropbox”, that automatically and in real time backs up to a safe place on the internet, so no matter what happens to your computer, your files are always safe and accessible online. Plus, if you have multiple computers, or a work and a home computer, you can install Dropbox on both, and it automatically syncs the files between computers! Save that document you were working on at work to your Dropbox, and there it is in the same place when you get home!

If you haven’t yet, check it out! You get two free gigabytes of free storage, and it can be expanded for up to ten or twelve gigs for free by doing things like uploading your first files, installing it on more than one computer, etc. Click the link below if you want to know more.

http://db.tt/wfMuToi

-Lace

This site will serve as an uncluttered unique website to showcase my graphics based projects when they reach their absolute final stage of completion. You can find a link to it at the top of the site, too! Check it often, That’s where a lot of my finished projects will go, possibly with links back to here for posts concerning more of the in depth and nitty gritty aspects of each project!

-Lace

So finals this fall semester are coming to a close here at Eastern Michigan University. Soon student’s sleep schedules will return to whatever is normal for college kids these days, the computer labs will empty, and SAG majors everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief, so glad to have even finished their projects that they couldn’t possibly begin to worry about the actual grade they will receive, which I hope will be good for all of us.

My most recent reason to celebrate is the completion of the final project that has been looming over me (driving me mad with worry) since early November, when I fell rather behind in a number of classes due to an accident that I sustained. After I spent a week in decontamination and the suits told me not to play with plutonium anymore, I had difficulty catching back up in classes. (Seriously though, it was a severe concussion.)

SAG 305, Environmental Design; A course meant to teach the basic concepts behind architectural design and BIM, one of the most common kinds of environments in which humans find themselves situated. While spending a semester studying Autodesk’s Revit software package, we 305-ers were tasked with selecting an on-campus building (or off campus, with approval) for recreating in the software package of our choice. Most chose Revit. A few others chose Autodesk 3ds Max. One nut even went with some open source software called Blender.

Below is a gallery of incremental renders created over the course of one day that display my progress in my final project, which was the Starkweather building here at EMU. Yes, I did wait too long to start it, mostly because I was still playing catch up in most of my classes. Also you can click HERE to explore the flash interface that lets you click through and explore the building from different angles, which was the actual final project that was demonstrated in class.

Expect a few more final project posts here at the labs as finals come to a close!

*Edit* Here’s the link to the project on my portfolio website, for trackback purposes.

-Lace

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

I’ve always had problems with my external hard drive. So many that I don’t know why I still have it, but that’s beside the point. It’s a 1 TB, two drive MyBook Pro formatted by and being run on Mac OSX. Note: This is the second time this has happened in as many summers. Somewhere along the line, the Mac OSX just decides it doesn’t want to freely let go of the drive, and wipes out my partition table, leaving my hard drive feeling incredibly brick-like. My data is still physically there. There was just NO way to get to it.

I found some help from a number of places, the best of which is this website:

http://perrohunter.com/read/30/repair-a-mac-os-x-hfs-partition-table

So following the instructions, testdisk to the rescue, to an extent. This at LEAST let me see that my data was still there and gave me valuable information about the drive.

But that wasn’t enough.

The drive was non writable. No matter what combination of unmounting, different connections into both Windows and Mac machines, I couldn’t progress through the instructions, as pdisk still claimed that the disk was, in essence, write protected, and that I should go home kid, you got no talent. There was just NO way to rewrite the dead partition table.

After four hours of play time on both Windows and Mac, with my head hung in despair, I decide what the heck, I’ll try it on one of my Ubuntu machines in my workshop.

Lo and behold! It mounts. It’s accessible. In fact, nothing at all seems wrong with it. Strange, I thought. Maybe by plugging it into Ubuntu it repaired the partition table. So I plug it back into my Mac. Again, no dice. But that’s okay, because I have access now through Ubuntu, and can copy the files to a different drive and then reformat, right?

Almost. One of my folders has a different owner from the owner/user ID on the Ubuntu machine. So I’m not allowed to access that folder or its contents in any way. The drive is still non-writeable as a whole, so I can’t change file permissions, and can’t change the owners, throwing chmod and chown out the window.

And here’s the saving grace. What if, I wonder, I created a new user on my Ubuntu machine to match the user ID of the Mac account, which I could see by selecting the inaccessible folder and looking through its properties. This may be a big DUH for some people, but for someone relatively new to *nix, it was a tremendous moment of possible comprehension for me.

Surprise. It worked. Created a new user with an identical UID, logged in, and there are my files, ripe for the transferring.

I sincerely hope that that helps someone. If it just saves ONE person from the headache I just had, it was worth the time writing the experience out. If you need more detailed steps along these lines, comment on the article and I’ll see what I can do.

-Lace

What’d you think? Wasn’t that incredible? These folks are basically using their GIANT Tesla coils as amplifiers, controlling the sparks similar to the way one would a speaker, making it vibrate at a certain controlled frequency to create different notes!. The guy who was playing with electricity? He has some serious guts. What an amazing show, what I wouldn’t give to see them live.

-Lace

Blender 2.57 is the first non-beta version of Blender’s newest incarnation. What does this mean to you? If you’ve already been using the 2.5 series beta versions, this means that a solid, stable version has released for you to play with, with a few new and changed features and far fewer bugs! If you’ve been holding off on the 2.5 series and are still working with a 2.4 Blender, you are in for a treat. Blender 2.5 has a fresh new code base, a reorganized and very intuitive and efficient GUI, tons of new features like volumetric smoke and flames, and overall just more powah!

If you haven’t even heard of Blender, well what are you waiting for! It’s a free (as in beer) 3D graphics package that can hold it’s own against the big boys. Sound too good to be true? I’m not exaggerating. It is an absolutely amazing package.

Head on over to Blender.org to check it out. You won’t regret it!

-Lace

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

Once the points were tracked in Syntheyes the data was imported into Blender, where the monkey head primitive built into Blender (Suzanne) was composited into the shot, seemingly resting on my hand. I had a few issues. I can’t seem to figure out how to get shadows working properly *an issue I solved after writing this article*.

You can see there is a bit of ghosting around the hand, due to the quick ‘mesh’ I made of the hand on which the shadows were placed. A little bit of editing would clean it up, but at this point this test as served its purpose. Onward to bigger and better things. There is a small amount of slippage / jitter between the 3D element and the video footage due to inexperience using Syntheyes on my part. Hey, that’s what these exercises are for!

I would be a bit more in depth with this post, but the wee hours of the morning are upon me and I need to get some sleep, so how about this. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave me one right at the bottom of this page!

-Lace

Okay, so not really. This a special effects test involving matchmoving and compositing courtesy of Syntheyes and Blender. It is a shot I’m quite fond of, and it even has a special effects breakdown to show the ‘steps’ taken to go from raw footage to final composite. I think the visual effects breakdown took as much time as the tracking and compositing work itself.

The raw image sequence was processed using supervised tracking in Syntheyes, meaning that each bright green triangular point shown in the video I actually supervised the manual tracking of from frame to frame. Time consuming? Yes. But look at the results! How cool is that?

Of course, my trusty Blender came through for me on all of the 3D aspects. Modeling, lighting, rendering, and compositing were all handled by this powerful beast of a 3D package. If you haven’t looked into it yet, really, what are you waiting for?

-Lace

Note, the trapezoid on his chest will eventually have button-like rivets along the outer edge, much like aviator jackets of old. He is to be a steampunk robot (one of the best kinds there is).

-Lace

The fact of the matter is, I have never seen any package commonly ‘recognized’ to be superior produce anything that Blender could not. In fact, I often see quite the opposite, in that few packages are as capable in reference to the multitude of features in which Blender dominates. What else can do particle simulation, volumetric smoke and fire, water, soft bodies, modeling, rigging, animating, texturing, and real world physics simulations all in the same package? Show me the money, folks.

I’m not necessarily saying that other packages are less capable, nor that Blender is the end all be all for every 3D user in the world. What I am saying is this; when you see a truly quality example of someone’s work, something they put a great deal of time and effort into perfecting to perfection, by all means ask how it was done and with what package. Compliment it if it truly shines, suggest better ways of doing things, compare pros and cons, and develop a unique and meaningful conversation or critique. What better way to learn?

But please. Please, refrain from changing your mind on the quality of craftsmanship just because it wasn’t made with an Autodesk product. It can leave a bad taste in both of your mouths, and may make you seem uninformed. By writing something off just because that high school computer science teacher you had said that it wasn’t worth a nickel of your time, you risk missing out on a tremendous number of opportunities! You might learn something new if you give yourself a chance to open up to it. Of course, that lesson can be applied to a lot of things in life, not just 3D modeling and animating application wars.

:p

Now that the render I’ve been waiting on is done, I can stop pseudo-ranting and get to the interesting part of the post. I spent all afternoon and evening today working in Syntheyes and Blender. The included short fifty frame video marks a number of firsts for me.

Into SynthEyes went the image sequence, (video footage broken into a separate image for each frame). SynthEyes is a software package that, to put it roughly, determines how cameras and objects move based on video footage so that we can further manipulate them in software like Blender. It’s one of the things that lets us add special effects. Then came an hour or two of supervised tracking, a first for me, as in the past I have used SynthEyes’ built in autotracking functions to automatically track my footage.

This time, not only did I track the movement of the camera using supervised tracking, but I also tracked a moving object in the footage, a vehicle driving down the road. After the tracking was done and the data was exported to Blender, I began playing with the idea of testing the footage by attached something to the side of the truck.

After a few hours of fiddling, the final product now arises. It’s a short (nearly two whole seconds) technical test slash learning experience comprised of a truck moving down the highway with an image of the TRON style spheres pasted realistically to its side. Not only is the truck moving, but the handheld camera is swiveling in a tripod like manner to track the truck as it moves along the road.

This may look pretty basic, and in some respects it is, but it is one of the most difficult hurdles in achieving realistic special effects and photoreal 3D additions to live action film. And jumping those hurdles can be a lot of fun.

-Lace

PS. Bonus points if you noticed Suzanne.

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

This old kitchen counter top (our shop used to be apartments) was torn out and rebuilt. It makes a perfect home for our CNC.

A month or two ago my CNC router was finally relocated to it’s semi permanent home in a dedicated CNC room of the shop (more importantly, off of my father’s main workbench). Fast forward to the final days of exams here at Eastern Michigan, around the 15th of December and I had begun sketching out a rough version of a vertical gun rack for a cousin of mine who recently received his first BB gun. A few minutes of modeling in CAD and setting up proper toolpaths later and the different components were lines of code just waiting to be transformed into a beautiful Christmas gift.

Around the 20th or so I started fabrication of the gun rack, while simultaneously designing some name plates for my sister’s two horses and, as a bit of a gag, one for my father’s angus as well. All went well until the last set of gun rack parts was to be manufactured. The machine kept ‘glitching’, for lack of a better explanation at the time. After ruining two or three pieces of perfectly good raw material, I finally figured out what was wrong. The aluminum coupler between the gantry stepper motor and a through rod was not tight enough and was slipping instead of turning the way it was meant to.

All I should have had to do was tighten up one set screw to temporarily fix it. It turns out, however, that when we originally built the machine we didn’t grind a flat spot for the set screw to bite into. That we used a threaded rod inside continues to confound me, my guess is that it is all we had on hand. The fact that the machine had operated accurately for even this long surprised me. To fix this problem, I had to tear down at least a third of the machine to get to the rod, grind it, and reattach the motor shaft properly.

Three hours later, (around midnight) the machine was back in operation. It was too late to keep working, I would continue the following day. Sleep deprivation and high speed cutting tools don’t mix well.

When the parts for the gun rack had finished machining, I started working on the three signs I had planned to make. They read ‘Bailey’, ‘Danny’, and ‘Mac’. Mac is the angus, named after the respective fast food burger. While the signs were being machined, I began the assembly (read as ‘gluing and clamping’) of the gun rack.

The sign making went relatively smoothly, although a failure of motor function (my own, not the machine’s) meant I needed a band aid on one or two fingers before Christmas eve had arrived. You can see a few of the steps above, from machining the actual signs from cherry to clear coating, painting, then sanding and clear coating again to get the black inlaid text effect.

Pictured above is the gun rack as it exists in its final form. It is meant to be mounted vertically with the butt of the BB gun resting in the inset portion of the top of the box, and its barrel poking up through a hole at the top. The box can be used to store BB’s and small targets, or anything else that will fit inside it.

Last but not least, the evening before returning to school I managed to get my hands on a piece of what I believe to be some kind of Plexiglas and wanted to machine it. Having no idea what to design, and having just rekindled my already fierce love for all things ‘Back to the Future’ (copyright Universal, I’m not profiting from this, yada, yada) by purchasing the new BTTF video game, I decided that a quick flux capacitor would make for a clean yet easy quick project. The phrase ‘All I’ve got is time’ was simply the first thing that came to mind. Twenty minutes later and I was on my way out to the shop.

I had never machined plexi before. First thing I realized; Yep. That’s much harder than wood. Next time, multiple small passes at a slower feed rate. Second thing I realized; plexi makes a MESS. I will be installing a chip collection system before I machine much more Plexiglas. Overall I was relatively pleased with it, however, and plan to do more in the future (har har).

Let me know what you think, and as always, if you like what you read here feel free to Subscribe to Posts with the link at the top of this page.

-Lace

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

However, I do have for your viewing pleasure a test/demo reel of Blender works that I’ve been doing for my upcoming animated short ‘r0B’, a story about a little robot who has to fix a broken down assembly line before the clock runs out. These shots were mainly all tests of some kind, the last one is my favorite, which shows the overall environment to date, as well as some test camera animations with random noise added to the movement for realism. This is an assignment for my SAG 245 class at Eastern Michigan University, which is due Tuesday, November 30th. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

-Lace

In the end I’m very satisfied with the build quality of the enclosure, it’s much safer than our current power supply, which I won’t post pictures of because photos alone may be enough to electrocute our readers into the next zip code. Next for the box is some (hopefully) light troubleshooting on the electrical end, and then refocusing the remains of my shop time on the larger side of this project. I’ll keep you up to date.

-Lace

If you liked this post and want to be notified of further posts by email, just sign up for email notification right here!

OR! You can watch it right below here. Don’t forget to click on at least 720p resolution for the full quality of a film made with completely free and open source software!

- Lace