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Something I need to look into more, building 3D objects with respect to popular cosplays and seeing if anyone is interested in painted/unpainted versions of certain models. There are a number of very complicated tiny pieces and larger details of good cosplays that are difficult to make, even with sculpey or resin casting.
I haven’t been doing enough 3D. It’s intimidating when there are so many other experienced artists out there, already working in the field, and so few positions available.
I’m getting away from other aspects of my blog, but I’d like to keep up posting.
Last year, I started 2 gallons of cider, one cherry flavored, which I dosed with brown sugar. It came out as more or less a total failure – it tasted like cherry cough syrup, and wasn’t a whole lot better after allowing it to mature a little longer. The other batch just went bad. I had added honey to it, and it just didn’t ferment correctly and tasted awful.
This year, I have myl 5 gallon glass carboy, which I intend on using to make mead or wine with next. I have 4 gallons of cider in it, plus Wyeast (brand) meant for cider and cider alone, and nothing else in it.
I have half a gallon of peach cider – which is only cider and peach juice, and the same with blueberry cider – nothing else added except for yeast. The carboy and the 2 half gallon jugs are currently parked in the pantry rather than the upstairs guest bathroom. 1) We need a usable guest bathroom, and 2) the pantry door is almost always closed, there’s no over head light, and there’s no reason to move them from the pantry until they’re done (no one is going to shower in the pantry) 3) humidity stability, 4) gives me an extra reason to keep the kitchen clean at all times to ensure no bacteria comes into contact with my brewing jugs. The carboy is currently sitting in the box I brought it home in for an extra layer of light protection when I do open the pantry.
in theory, I can get about 10 12-oz bottles of cider per gallon. Minus a bottle’s worth at the bottom of stuff that’s too close to the dead yeast, and I can probably do six 6-packs of hard cider, and 1 six pack each of the flavored cider, which could work great for six or seven 4-1-1 gift boxes for presents. The rest we’ll keep for ourselves.
I’m attempting to get my for pay cosplay business up and running. It’s a side business at most, not meant to do more than bring in some extra money and teach myself techniques I wouldn’t otherwise pick up, since I’m crafting costumes for all sizes of men and women. I’ve done a Riddler jacket for a guy just before DragonCon, and I’m just wrapping up a black Imperial Officers uniform, with the intention that it’ll be 501st ready. After that, I have Classic Ben Kenobi’s Jedi robe -Rebel Legion standards – and the rest of his costume as fabric gets ordered. I’m also working on a Midna bodysuit for another buyer.
Kim’s Notes on the Imperial Uniform Jacket.
For the Imperial Uniform, there are a number of tutorials and sets of instructions that I muddled through, but there are at least a few really important things to note:
While working off the Simplicity pattern for the Civil War Unform, use only view A. Or whichever view it is that has the short coat and fastens in the middle. Use the pattern piece from the fancier coat for the front panel, and use the back of the fancy coat to get in the princess seaming which is required for 501st.
The front panel should be very very close in size to the bottom of the back panel where it meets the waist, inside the princess seams.
Remove the seam from the middle back panel
Attach the front flap/panel just below the collar edge, so the collar doesn’t get in the way of the edge of the panel at the neck, and vice versa.
Ignore the skirt part of the pattern, except for the general curve of the pieces and the length of the pattern pieces. Cut the skirt pieces so that four seams line up with the front panel/flap and the back panel edge seams where it meets the princess seams. 2 panels will be on either side from the other edge of the princess seam to the front panel edge. One skirt piece will be longer and be the front/flap skirt piece that overlaps the left side skirt. Cut matching lining pieces.
The pattern calls for pleats. Do not pleat anything.
Generally, you will need to add a small modesty panel at the neck where the collar edges meet, to completely cover the neck. This can be a simple rectangle, stitched to the inside side of the collar before attaching to the jacket.
If adding pockets, which are required for 501st standard, cut the pattern piece of the fancy coat across at the armpit, and add enough space between the top and bottom to make a pocket that goes all the way across the front, for the side under the folding panel/flap. the side with the panel flap has a separate piece that is stitched to a lengthened (pocked added) short front side piece that only goes from the armpit to edge of the panel.
So it goes – front flap/panel, pieced to side with length for pocket. Under that is a full front that meets in the middle like a normal jacket, the flap/panel is attached to the same seam the hidden front is – at the inside side seam. I’m installing a zipper in this ‘normal’ front. My front normal pieces are lined with the same fabric rather than my lining fabric. The flap/panel is also fully lined with the gaberdine.
I hope this makes some sense.
Oddly enough, I haven’t been updating because my spam filter works and I haven’t been reminded to go trash about 30 spam comments or so a week, and thus have been neglecting my website.
Anyway.
Small update, but it’s 3D work, dammit.
We really wanted to go down to Florida to view the final shuttle launch, but I guess this will do for now.
Work is creating an animated open for our coverage of the final launch. I talked my boss into letting me make him a shuttle for it. The detail isn’t all that great, but most of the render is just of the rear view anyway, so the front of the model is .. not pretty, but won’t be seen. The render is 60 frames long, and will have effects added over it in addition to a camera shake. Only the orbiter was needed, since this is supposed to depict the final stage before entering orbit.
I downloaded the object from the NASA 3D resource library. I looked at a couple free ones on Turbosquid before it occurred to me to just check the source, and sure enough, NASA has a decent selection of satellites, rockets and shuttles. I tried the one labeled ‘hi-res’ first, but it was a nightmare of poorly put together tris. Tabbing revealed a huge number of unconnected polygons.
I then downloaded the most recently added shuttle model. It was a few years old, but still not bad, but not meant for any close ups. I fixed the floating seams and converted most of the tris to quads and cleaned up the overall lines of the thing. I deleted the engines and made new ones as well as the base under the engine rather than break my brain joining tris into quads. The black details are named surfaces while the bottom and back are plane projected textures from NASA’s website.
I deleted all unncessary polys, including everything in the bay, and deleted the folded out doors and replaced them with new polys that were connected to the body of the shuttle. I added decals on the wings for Atlantis and NASA. One thing that surprised me was that the back of the shuttle really is completely flat. I’m not sure why this is, but it was one of those ‘huh. It really is just one flat piece with engines attached. The shuttle is huge, so I’m probably losing some details.
Overall, I’m pleased with what I put together in a short timespan, but I always wish I had more time to work on things.
3D football
I actually finished this a few weeks ago, but I thought I’d post it so I can have an update.
We already had one, but it was difficult to texture, and was not sectioned.
I created this one by quartering a sphere, then halving, and then building up the edges from there, mirroring in all 3 axis. The Football was then quartered again into separate layers, and the stitching added in a 5th layer. I copied and pasted all 4 quarters into a 6th layer, merged the points and made a smooth solid object that will prevent anyone from peering through the ends or narrow cracks.
Untextured, I imported all 6 layers in to VIZrt, and assembled them into one single group with 6 layers, each layer one object aligned together to become one football. The model’s layers can be textured with with different images – one of VIZ’s greatest weaknesses is the fact that you can only have one image on a single object, and the only way around it is to cut up objects into layers. This becomes particularly painful when importing objects, since they don’t import relative to one another, nor scaled. They always import centered and sized badly. The object has to be painstakingly aligned after importing. I made a version of the football with holes for the stitches, but it did not import correctly.
Quartered, the football can have a different skin on each quarter. I made a base football skin layer that can have images layered on top of it in Photoshop, then imported into VIZ and dropped onto the previous image. Each image must match the previous one – the top right quarter image can only be replaced with the same corresponding image. Logo must be added to “Top Right” skin and saved, for example. The bottom quarters do not have white stripes, the top quarters do. Splitting the football into quarters also solved the single plane stretching issue. VIZ only applies textures along one axis, which is very problematic for rounded objects, as I discovered with my football helmet.
The Future has a Silver Lining
The watermark might be a bit much at this point, but I’m nothing if not paranoid. So a friend emailed me this week and asked if I’d be interested in creating a couple of tester images to see if anyone would be interested in buying t-shirts and other merchandise using images based on old movies. Well, 80′s and some older ones anyway. So her first suggestion resulted in this, and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s based off a billboard seen in RoboCop. If it doesn’t go anywhere, at least I have some completed artwork.
The text was modified from an existing font – to the point that I basically remade every letter except “I”. The buildings are not an exact replica of the original, though I could have done them. Space was taken in a little on either side so the graphic would fit better on a t-shirt. The clouds were done with a simple cloud render tool in Photoshop.
I suddenly expect my spam folder to explode. But oh well.
Inspired by an IM chat with a friend earlier tonight: first of (maybe) a series of sketches, and equally maybe, finalized digital images of moogles n’ boobies. Instead of Cats n’ Racks.
This was a quick sketch, maybe 1 hr, and I’d like to do more with it, including finish her hair and maybe add a hand over the bottom half of Lulu’s sleeping moogle.
Nothing technical today. I’m working on a set of shoulder armor for my cosplay costume, and they are so strange looking that I decided to create them in Lightwave to get a better idea of how to manufacture them. The design is fairly simple, but proportionally, they look very strange – on the character, they’re pretty big. The model I made is lacking the design details, because I really only wanted to get the basic shape down so I would have a better idea on how to carve it out of cardboard.
I’m going to create a new instructable when they’re done.
I started with a stack of around 15-20 sheets of cardboard glued together in a massive block, let it thoroughly dry, and went at it with an angle grinder until I got the basic shape. The rough shaping took about an hour. After that I spent some time using a chisel and a utility knife cutting and digging out roughly the underside of the armor where it will rest on my shoulders. I spent around 3 hours off and on with cutting and grinding bits on the dremel tool smothing down the edges and cutting away smaller pieces. I have at least another hour ahead of me getting the two pieces symmetrical. Then another hour constructing the funny looking top half and preparing a styrofoam ball to be the gem, by covering it in clay to start.
After that they’re reasonably smooth, I’m going cover them in bondo, sand them, prime them, then paint with black ‘hammered metal’ spray paint, then paint the gold trim. Hopefully they’ll be ready for Roundcon next weekend.
The rest of the costume is basically done, except for 2 cloth costume times that are as simple as hemming one piece of fabric into a rectangle and adding velco or elastic. I spent last night washing and re-conditioning the leather gloves I”m going to use for the outfit. Still waiting for my plasma ball to come in the mail.
Earth render for project
So, I’m working on an Earth for a new work project, and I’m having some issues with the layers on the planet. I’ve spent too much time on it already, but it’s not ‘right’ yet.
There’s one layer for earth, one for the sky/atmosphere and one for the clouds. The cloud layer has a bump map on it to imitate some of the close up photos you get with the earth from orbit where you actually can see the clouds puffing up against the edge of the planet. I had to turn off specularity on the ‘sun’ because it made my earth too bright, and now the oceans are too dark and you can’t see any land under the cloud cover. I have an alternate earth with clouds as ‘puffy clouds’ procedural texture, which works to some decent degree, but then there’s simply too much of them, they cover almost the entire surface of the planet. I may go back to that version just because they still look fairly good.
