Smoke Simulation and the Make Human Project

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Over Thanksgiving, I spent time back in Miami, where I grew up.  During that time I essentially took a break from everything… including projects.  However… I did find some interesting material regarding 3D that I made note of to try…

First, check out this tutorial on Blender Smoke Simulation!

I’m pretty impressed with the tutorial.  I need to try to make something that uses this sweet feature!

The 2nd thing is the Make Human project.  Essentially it’s a programmatic way of generating human meshes.  It turns out that I have a very important use of this project… In the first Little Robots animation, I need hands, arms and legs.  Hopefully I’ll be able to use this project for the initial meshes! It’ll save me a HUGE amount of time!

Computer Setup in Scene

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This drawing represents how the main computer in the animation will be arranged.  It’s loosely based on my actual computer layout.  Yes, voicing the Richard character from the script isn’t going to be a stretch for me!

In real life, my center display is an iMac and I have a my Mini set up to be a shell server.  I don’t think that the Richard in the animation would need a set up like this… instead he probably has a couple of home made linux servers under his desk.

So, what needs to happen next… I have to model a set of headphones, customize the monitors so that three distinct monitor models exist.  I have to model a mouse and my Griffin Powermate… and I need to start working on the videos that will make up the monitor content.  The latter will be the most challenging, I’m sure.  I honestly don’t know how video as a texture will render.

Workbench Concept Art

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Over the weekend, I was having serious trouble modeling out what I thought the assembly area on the desk would look like.

Originally I had envisioned an aligator clip contraption, sets of tweezers, and a magnifier lamp.  That all seemed kind of boring though.  I then came up with a stepper motor kind of arm contraption that would be used in place of the aligator clips.   As it turns out, this is a hard thing to model without some kind of visual reference… and since it’s a fictional piece of equipment… well… I had to go back to the drawing board… literally.

The actual size of this armature would be pretty small as what it held would be the primary focal point of the magnifier lamp.  Since it’d be pretty small, it’s impractical to adjust the thing by hand, so I came up with a set of dials which will connect via wires to the robotic armature.

Here you see three knobs, which ostensibly control three axis of adjustment that the arm can move in.  The larger, shorter section of the knob is used for “course” movement and the smaller, longer inner knob is for “fine” movement.

My first stab at drawing this thing had all 3 knobs lined up in space, but it occurred to me that if I did that, the gearing of the knobs within the housing would all intersect.  Because of that, they’re all offset from each other slightly in the drawing… and will also be in the model.

Hello Seña – The Script

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Last weekend I worked out the first draft of “Hello Seña”, the script that I’ll use for the first Little Robots animation.  As I described in my post “Getting it Together“, the scene takes place just before our first Little Robot gets activated.

If you’re interested in reading the script… it can be found [here].

Originally I had planned on making the dialog very plain, but while writing the script, I was inspired to add a few dark elements…

RICHARD: It sounds like we are ahead of schedule then. What about the others? Have you heard anything else from them?

ONEMURI: No, I haven’t and it’s been a while.  I’m getting a little worried that something has happened.

The conversation pauses for a moment.  Richard leans back in his chair and exhales.

RICHARD: Well, even if they were found out, we’re all supposed to be isolated, right?  There’s nothing else that we can do but do our best.

From this excerpt, you can see that I’ve added a layer of secrecy to the overall mythology.  Onemuri and Richard have some secret timeline and they are colluding with others who seem to have gone missing.

An interesting challenge of this script will be that most of the dialog will be in Japanese.  Since I don’t speak Japanese but plan on voicing the Richard character in the story, this means that I’ll have a lot of verbal practice to look forward to.

My first Blender animation

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I originally modeled this several months ago… but each of my renderings had little issues… first with lighting… then with camera clipping… I worked out the various issues but never actually went through the 10+ hours of re-rendering it at decent quality until now… here you go… my first blender animation!

Something to write with

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Adding to the list of random things on my desk, we have a pen and a piece of paper.

The piece of paper is about as trivial to model as you might thing.  I decided to UV Map it so that I could have both a front and back side of the page (though you can’t see it here).  It also means that the stuff on the page itself will deform properly if I decide to wrinkle or otherwise mess with the page.

The pen was trickier to model than I thought.  There are some funny curves and you have to cinch the subdivision surfaces at the right places for them to look right.  For some reason the label that I applied to the pen refuses to show up in this rendering. I’ll have to dig into that later.

Cables!

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The way you model cables in Blender involves is summarized with this video: Making a Cable in Blender.

The thing is, that tutorial was created using the older interface… and it’s a bit tough to find in the new one.  After struggling with it a little bit… I came up with the cable you see to the right.

I can now begin to create lots and lots of cable… which is good because cables make the world go round!

Books and Book Covers

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Creating book covers, particularly when you don’t really care about how well the book will actually sell… is a lot of fun.  For the first Little Robots animation, I need to come up with a *TON* of books…. here are the first two…

These are both hard cover books… I still have to build out a soft cover model as well as a Schaum’s outline style workbook model.  I’m sure that the softcover and workbooks will be more challenging than one might think… Sure, you could model it like just a box… but unlike hard cover books, the covers of their lighter weight counterparts tend to lift up on their own… plus there’s the possibility of the covers kinking and creasing.

If you’d like to use any of these book covers in your own models.. or are just curious what the images I built for them look like… here you go! Click for larger version.

I designed this one last night at like 1am.  It’s a pretty stoic design… and really was meant to be just the template image to use for future books.  I ended up liking the way it came out… so It’ll probably get used in the actual animation.

This second book I took a little more time with.  The image that you see on the front and back covers was taken with my iPhone.  I had a couple of old 1GB DIMMs from my Mac Mini.  I placed them side by side and snapped the image being careful not to have any company logos or names showing.

I need maybe 4 or 5 more tech related books to have laying around on my desk.  Any ideas?

New Desk Accessories

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This weekend I went through and added a couple new models to my desk scene..

First off, I wanted to model out a computer.  This is my rendition of a mac mini (older model).  Right now it’s really just the basic shape and a little bit of texturing… but it’ll do.  The power light is always on, even if it’s not plugged in.  It occurred to me while I was modeling this, I have no real idea how to make lights switch on/off… this is probably something I need to look into.

Along with the computer, it seemed pretty obvious that I’d need a monitor of some kind.  This is a pretty generic looking monitor.  I took the basic shape/button layout from a Dell 17″ LCD but stretched it out a little to make it wide screen.  At the moment, the buttons are all blank, but at some point in the future, I’ll add the UV mapping for a power switch, +, -, and source.  The base isn’t very inspiring, but I didn’t really want to spend a great deal of time on it…

 

Here’s a real rendering with the new computer components.  I still need to add cables, but in proper lighting both of these models look pretty good… you should be able to click for the full sized image.

What’s on my desk..?

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… stays on my desk…

This image is just me showing off the new desk model that I created in blender.  This is based on my actual desk layout at home… although the objects resting on the desk in this case are fictional.  This is the first of many models necessary to bring about the scene described in a previous blog post… essentially where my first little robot will be born.

You aught to be able to click to get the original rendering.  Probably the most complex bit of this rendering is the lighting.  There’s a mix of yellowish artificial light coming from spotlights located behind the turret… and then a slightly blueish “natural” light from behind.