New Pottery

Here are the first two pieces finished pieces for my pottery class.  Its good to be back after 2 years.  I will have a few more bowls and vases coming soon, and I hope to start working on a teapot.

The metal figure is also coming along.  Next week I will have all of the appendages assembled, so I'm planning on taking some photos and posting them.

SpaceScape

I've been thinking about how to make a nice space-like background for MicroSwarmigism.  Even though it takes place in the ocean, I like the way that space backgrounds look.  I was watching a tutorial on Unity, and it mentioned SpaceScape by Alex Peterson. Its a free tool specifically for making space backgrounds.  It always amazes me how people make these free tools, and then just release them for everyone to use, for free.  I made this one using a tutorial.

Jelly Time

Trying out some jellyfish styles.  Made in Photoshop, Blender, and, for the first time, Sculptris.  Sculptris is a great free sculpting program, made by Pixologic.  Pixologic also makes ZBrush, which is an amazing but extremely expensive program for sculpting detailed 3D models.  I think its awesome that they would come out with a free version.   Its still in beta, but works fine most of the time.   I'm hoping to use it to make something more complex and interesting.

Proof of Spirits

My good friend and apartment-mate, Chris, just started a new blog.  While his first blog, To the Rails, is about electronics (and has been pretty successful I might add), the new one is about alcohol.  Electronics and alcohol?  Now that's a winning combination.

Its mostly about mixed drink recipes.  Go ahead and check it out, you might find your new favorite drink.  Link is below and in the sidebar on the right.

http://proofofspirits.blogspot.com

Gorden Freeman Drawing

This has been a very time-consuming drawing.  I chose Gorden Freeman from the game Half-Life as the topic because he is awesome, and because I thought it would be a good challenge for me.  It was definitely a challenge.

MicroSwarmigism Short 3

Here is the next short. This one introduces the virus MicroSwarmigism.  The next one might take an extra few days, because the boid particle effect is Blender is not the easiest thing in the world to work with.  


Boids are groups of objects that mimic living flocks or swarms.  They were invented by Craig Reynolds, and they follow at least three rules-- they move toward the average center of the swarm, they try not to get too close to one another, and they try to stay in alignment with the other boids.  When you see epic battles in movies like Lord of the Rings, they are animated using boids (which, of course, have a more complicated set of rules above these simple ones). 

MicroSwarmigism Short 2

Here is my next little animation.  The pink particle effect is a sort of poison mutation that these little guys use to defend themselves.  They are a little less mobile that the last guy, as you can see.  I suppose that, in contrast to the last post, these guys are eukaryotes because they have membrane-bound organelles.  Biologists, help me out here?

Anyway, more animations to come.