I'm Back! (With Looping Snake-Biting-Its-Tail Image)

Well, it's been a while since I've posted and a lot of changes have occurred! I've been busy with schoolwork, so haven't had a chance to properly test some concepts for my new idea in Blender until now.

Anyways, this is a rendering of the "ouroboros" the mythical symbol of the snake biting its tale. I took it from a google image search, used Image Trace in Illustrator to turn it into a path, then exported to blender as a curve. Added some materials in Cycles, animated the looping eye animation and some slight turbulent displace in After Effects to give it a slow, ethereal quality in its movement.

Finally took it into Photoshop, exported as a .GIF and voila! Hopefully more of these to come (I can just stare at this animation forever!)

Here's a link to the original source image on Photobucket.

Poor Suzanne!

She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time! Thought I'd polish up my animation skills and tell a brief but important story. One of blender's other infamous objects makes an appearance ;)

Psychedelic Flags - Now in .GIF form!

The Great Psychedelic Experiment

Hey guys,

The title might seem pretty bold, but that was kind of the feeling I'm going for. I want to create a series of trippy visualizations, showing how the effects of acid and other drugs might be perceived. For years, movies and technology have tried to capture the experience that many drug users have talked about, but with marginal success.

I think the closest that come to mind are "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas", and "Enter The Void."

So my entry into the fray is this first attempt. Granted, it's probably a little bit cheesy and retro, but that's what I was going for. It's unmistakably "trippy." Hopefully these videos will improve and get more realistic and subjective, depending on your point of view. In the meantime, enjoy:

"Save-the-date" Wedding Invitation

Hey guys - I know I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy doing other things. This is a video template I created last November. The idea is that people can have their personal information submitted, and they receive their very own wedding invitation which they can email to all of their friends.

It's created within Blender, and the music has been added in After Effects. Took me a long time to get the timing worked out, and then sync the music to it afterwards.

Enjoy!

Playing With Sketchfab - Global Illumination With Cornell Room

Hey everyone. Happy new year!

Just thought I'd bring in the new year by tinkering with Sketchfab, the cool 3D model hosting site without plugins.

This is my first foray. I'm not, obviously, a modeller nor a gamer, so this is not to show off any skills other than my competency in uploading this ;)

I basically wanted to recreate the global illumination with cycles, but make it real time. To do this, I had to bake a light map for the environment. Unfortunately, there's no easy way in blender to bake a lightmap in Cycles (feature request!), so I basically had to cheat, unwrap the objects and back using orthagonal projection. After a long process, I finally got all the lightmaps working and in Sketchfab.

Take a look!

GI Cornell Room Test from Blender Illusionist on Sketchfab.

Blender User Pyroevil's Blog (Creator of Molecular Script)

Hey - I just discovered user Pyroevil's awesome blog and amazing new particle script, Molecular. It basically creates finely generated particles with true hard collisions!

Awesome stuff:

http://pyroevil.com/

Large Hadron Collider - v02 W.I.P. - Larger and More Post Productions

OK, well never content to leave well enough alone, here's another render that I made, spending the better part of yesterday rendering. It's at 1920x1200 (the resolution of my monitor) in case anybody wants to use it for a desktop image. It's still a work in progress, but I think it's cool.

Notice the darker look (I accidentally rendered out in "linear" space for you color geeks out there), and a slight film grain to dirty it up a bit. Also some very slight chromatic abberation, because lord knows how easy it is to go overboard with that sort of thing.

I've been meaning to show my process more, so I think posting unfinished stuff is a good start. Enjoy!

Click to see the full size image.