Archive for February, 2009

Again, not really too much fluff I can add to this one; it pretty much speaks for itself.

I had ideas for two entries, both quite retro. One being a big old bad boy of a digital watch, and the other being a big old bad boy of one of the world’s most annoying items to ever have been invented, and I’m not talking about five pence coins here.

Have a look and see for yourself:

This one was supposed to be based on a watch I owned when I was a little’un. It was so big compared to my left wrist, I used to walk round in circles.

As you can probably tell; I augmented the design a bit to bring some humour.
I never finished this entry (as the more aware amongst you may well have spotted), but I do feel as though the idea was headed in the right direction.

Here we have the most annoying object in the world. The 1980s alarm clock.
Despite this being one of the most hated items in the world, I think I managed to do it a decent justice.

Now I wish I another one to break, just like the good old days!!

Keep well all, more soon.

This is a test where I was mucking around with a technique for more realistic metal (please excuse the crappy-looking motion blur – I was too impatient to wait for something higher quality to render!). Using just a basic model, I wanted to see how some new material features in Lightwave 3D work.

So, in order to achieve a desired ‘brushed metal’ look, what we need to do is set up the materials to use *techo-gabble* anisotropic specular shading and reflections *end of techno-gabble*. Very exciting!!

We’ve been wanting to figure out this look for a while now, since watching the excellent animated movie Robots. There are some other more complex looks from there to recreate, which we know are possible with Lightwave, but very complex. So these will take a fair amount of time to figure out.

Below is a screen grab of the material and nodes set up, so you can see how this was made.

I already know that this post is going to be pretty short.

I’m not trying to shirk my post-writing responsibilities here, honest. But seriously; how many paragraphs do you think I can write between the title and the image, that would actually mean something?

What goes up must come down:

This entry was a little less cheeky than the one about Stephen Hester’s pay packet.

Oh, what the hell!….. (think I might really get it in the neck for this).

What goes up must come down:

<
Yeah, I should probably sign off now and wait for some sort of complaint!

Keep well all, more soon.

This, we here at EESB think, deserves a very big !w00t!

!w00t!

This week, the people who make our 3D software of choice; NewTek, announced version 10 of their OSCAR and EMMY winning modelling, animation and rendering package ‘LightWave’.

Version 10 is named “CORE” (Centralised Object Reference Engine), and the few details that they have decided to pass along to us humble user-folk at this pre-release stage have got us pretty excited…

The option of operating under a single unified application, instead of the two discrete parts that the programme currently is. A native scripting language of Python, with SWIG support.
Instancing, modifier and history stack, interactive deformation modifiers with handles and customisable user-interface.

With two years of development so far, written from the ground up in C++ in order to keep the application as efficient as possible and the SDK completely transparent and open to third parties. It is fully multi-threaded, multi-processor and GPU aware. In NewTeks’ own words: It works great in 32-bit, and is a monster in 64-bit. “~ is a monster in 64-bit.” Music to our ears!

“Yay”, we hear you say “Sounds wonderful, but what exactly does that techno-babble you’ve just spouted up there actually mean to us?”

Oh. Errrrm. I’m thinking, one moment please.
*cue lift music*

What this does mean, is a faster, more stable, robust and versatile application that enables us to do what we do best; be freely creative in producing the things that make up your projects.

We believe that NewTek will be rolling out the final release version 1.0 in the last quarter of this year; so there is still a fair amount of time to wait, but we’re already excited. Hopefully we will beta-testing the new tool starting from a few weeks time until release. As they say: “Bring on the trumpets.”

To see the list of features, straight from the horses mouth, have a wibble here, here and for the tech-spec details, here.

The future has a CORE.

More soon, keep well all.

This round saw me as the subject-picking-and-a-judging-type-person, as either a prize or a punishment (depending on how you view these things!) for winning round 22 with my ‘Stoopid Gun’.

It’s actually more difficult that you think to choose a subject matter for these modelling challenges. In our opinion, you need to pick something that has enough of an enclosed brief so that people know where their thinking should be based, but you also need enough scope on the subject that people will be able to interpret it in their own ways; to produce the left-field entries that we love so much.

I decided to go with ‘containers’. I cannot really say much more about an enclosed brief can I!?

As part of the rules, the subject-picking-and-a-judging-type-person can post entries into the round, but these entries will not be judged along with the others, which I believe makes sense.

So, my non-judged entries for this weeks challenge:

Plain and simple, classic tins.

And, an old style cigarette case.

Enjoyable work to do. The velvet lining of the ciggy-case was a job in itself!

Keep well all, more soon.

Following the information-hungry frenzie brought about by the announcement of CORE, by NewTek (see the second post up if you’re a wee bit baffled!), it was decided to run this round of speed modelling in the same vein.

Not an amazing amount of detail in this one from me…. which I suppose makes it very efficient, to say the least. I tried to put some atmosphere into the render even though it isn’t a lighting or rendering challenge, you know…. just to keep myself happy!

More soon, keep well all.