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A friend of mine gave me am invite to the Beta of a little program called Skitch. According to the site, Skitch “is an amazingly fun and super useful. Everyday we all share images, ideas and have fun with friends online — this should be easy… right!?” As a user of Photoshop and rather expectant of high quality in my imagery, I was a little unsure if this program would be useful to me. Well, I was certainly proved wrong!

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For our Print Design class, we were supposed to do research into DVD packagings in preparation for doing our own design work. I spent around an hour in an HMV looking at special edition and regular DVDs but didn’t really find anything that really captured my attention. One item, the Scarface Limited Edition, had some interesting elements. So, I decided to see if there were any more photos of it online. With my searches, I stumbled upon Feed My Brain, a website documenting someone’s (I couldn’t find a name!) personal DVD collection including Film and TV special edition box sets. There are tons of images of all sorts of collections. I highly recommend looking at the site if you are looking for inspiration or simply to marvel at the collected works from around the world. From that site, I came across Skull Face, a site that also documents DVD collections as well as reviews them. See one of the most amazing ones, the Band of Brothers LE, after the cut.

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This term, I’m working on a project for both my Designing Physical Interfaces class and my OOP (Object Oriented Programming) class. My idea was to create a “virtual gardener” program for a multi-touch display that would allow one to prune, adjust its growth and more. Not just that, but I want the tree to be fractal driven so they are different every time the program is run or the tree is generated. In preparation for this project, I started spending time with L-systems, or Liedermeyer Systems.

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Alas! It has been far too long since I last graced this blog with content! The writings of a certain verbose friend of mine somewhat shamed me into how I had ignored you all for so long! Much has happened since my last post and I shall do my best to document them. I’ll start posting up some various things today. So much to say! Please look forward to it!

We are coming up on the final days of this term and I’m afraid that I have been working a little too hard to get everything accomplished. On the plus side, please look forward to the various videos and other projects that I’ll be posting later in the week!

A special highlight this term will be 3D through Cinema 4D. Be prepared for all the ups, the downs, the shiny and the ungodly long render times as honestly reported by myself! I must be to bed as it will be an early start tomorrow.

There is a old saying, “A stitch in time saves nine.” The meaning being that if one takes that extra little bit of time to make sure everything is perfect before working, then one will save a great deal of time. Well, apparently I didn’t check my work well enough (which doesn’t really make sense given the number of times I did a test render), but some stuff ended up off of what it should have been.

Thus I have wasted nearly 22 hours of render time.

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And now I have to fix it.

I can assure you I will be carefully checking things now.

I have for you friendly folks two rendering projects I am currently working on.

The first is a soccer field that is being designed for a motion graphics infographic piece for this term. My partner and I are going to explain the lovely game of soccer (that’s football to you non Americans) and give the viewer a basic introduction to the sport. So, this field is going to be the primary container for the piece, moving about and exploring. Should be fun.

The hardest part I found was in creating the net. The goal itself was pretty simple and just a matter of creating the cylinders and then bending them as needed. The net though, was a bit of work because I wanted to put the

slight gravity drop into it. Ultimately, I created a plane and attached cloth nurbs, then bent it the same as the tubing. Finally, after setting fixed points to all the edges, I applied “relax” and watched gravity do its job^^ Quite thrilling when it all worked out. The ball was the result of a tutorial I followed. I had painted it beforehand but discovered that shrinking the size of the ball messes up the special texture, so I need to repaint it. *sigh* As for the field, the floor and texture are native to Cinema 4D while the lines were originally created in Illustrator, then imported into the area. All in all, it was a fun project! Now I just need to apply the camera movements and we’ll be in business.

The other item for you today is a pill I kinda threw together for a DVD menu. The ultimate look will feature text on the pill indicating “Play,” “Scene Selection” and so forth. I thought it would be cool to have the pill rotate when the user clicks the “left” or “right” button on their remove and shift to a new button. Here is the front where the main menu will be.

and here is the back where the special features or scene selection will be. We haven’t quite worked that out yet!

I’m rather proud of this idea and I like how it is shaping up. I’ll be sure to post more about it in the future!

Today’s image comes from a project for class in which we needed a marker. Well, it was much more fun (and useful!) to make in 3d, so here we are! It was pretty simple to put together.

Project charters are not the easiest things to write. One of my big issues is that I want to make it the best I can, but the whole thing still hasn’t really clicked in my mind. On the other hand, it is a very learned skill. The more one practices, the better one gets; at least that’s what I tell myself! In any case, I’m currently working on one for a team project. Utimately I had to redo the whole thing after the first client meeting changed a few elements of the project, so that’s been a fun activity for the weekend, but all in all, things are slowly getting better. Here’s to hope that over time they’ll just continue to improve!

I’ve spent a bit more time working on the pirate ship. I’ve found that it is an awesome thing to do in those little stretches of time where one doesn’t have time to do serious work, but has too much time to laze around. In any case, I’ve added in some rigging, the captain’s wheel, some barrels and the flag! I also managed to get the sails looking like I want them to. There is a bit of a weird shadow that shows up in the image, but that is due to the kind of shadow being applied (hard). When I do the final render, I’ll use area shadows to make it look super nice, although it will take about 5 to 10 times as long to render. Fun!