Post Holiday Rendering

 

I took the quiet time today to work on a medieval style armillary sphere in Blender.  In an earlier version, I had difficulties punching the glyph for Gemini out of the band because Blender got a little confused by the negative space and couldn't perform a boolean difference, and instead performed a boolean addition.  

Today's agenda includes cleaning, resting, dusting, laundry, crafting some thank you notes (which I really should send out instead of looking at a stack of completed notes needing postage) and waiting for the books I ordered three weeks ago to arrive.

Pretending to be a Graphic Designer

When I'm not writing or critiquing or trying to learn new programming languages or playing the harp or trying to be a better person, I make little cards using Blender.

Here's one I made for Mother's Day.  I based the design off of some water lilies carved on the side of an Egyptian temple.  The objects are the same color, and I tinted them with different colored lights.

 I made this card for my brother-in-law, who's an engineer.  I figured he'd like the platonic shapes and the simple lighting.  I wanted this one to look a little like some 1920 German lithograph.  There were only two lights, a white and a blue one.   I arranged the solids to be paired with their doubles (the icosahedron and the dodecahedron, the cube and the octehedron, and the tetrahedron with itself).

This was going to be a background for 2014's Christmas card, and we were going to be riding the notes like they were Segues.  I wanted it to look like a Brazilian bar Donald Duck Jose Carioca and the Arucan Bird dance in, but Mark said it was "too gay" and nobody really got their poses right, so we scrapped it for a more traditional card.

This time around I colored the objects so I wouldn't have a melange of colored shadows in the background.  Below (I think) the view of the camera, I used green and white lights against a few triangle shapes to imply a forest background.  Making the treble clef was particularly difficult because I imported it from InkScape, and converting it from curves to a mesh object introduced some holes in the object I had to manually go through and close up -- otherwise it would have had some funny looking holes in it where there was no outside facing the camera.

New Lamp Design

For Valentine's Day, Mark got me some Very Cool LED lights.  They're remote controlled, and they turn all sorts of objects into incredible lamps.  They work so well that Mark said my paper lamps look amateury next to them.


Well.


So now I've got an extra-curricular art project to work on when I'm taking a (small) break from writing.

 I think this could make a nice cut-out lamp lattice, thank you very much.

Squares and Triangles

These could make interesting screens for paper lamps.

I made them about a year ago.  I like how they came out, but I think the interior squares and triangles could use some beefing up, or else the framing ones need to be reduced so there less of a contrast between the two type of polygon.

When the proportions are closer, the shapes look less like squares and triangles and more like interlocking cylinders.  When the cylinders are more apparent, then it's easier to see radiating stars in the composition.

I can't remember if I drew these in Inkscape and imported them to Blender, or if I built them entirely in Blender.  What's great about Blender is the ability to easily change the lighting.  The top rendering reminds me of August wheat, while the bottom render feels more like a  December snowfall.

Lamps and Renders

Mark got me some remote controlled LEDs for valentine's day.  They have six LEDs on them, so they have multiple light points.  I think six points would show a single point cut out of a housing fairly well, but when I tried it with a star mesh similar to the rendered housing pictured to the left, the resulting shadows were kind of blurred together.

I tried putting one of the LED arrays into a mason jar and filling it with red tissue paper.  The result is nice, and Very Country Cute.

We had a paper lamp made for Chinese New Year, and it was a perfect example of form and function when I hung it over the LED array.

I think I'll try something Frank Lloyd Wright--a square lamp housing with a peaked roof and a simple line shape over an opaque white paper shade.  

Or maybe I can fire up the electric griddle and melt crayons into a pattern on wax paper and wrap the paper into a cylinder.

More as I try stuff....

Circles of Interwoven Stars

Here's a Blender rendering I did a while back.  I keep coming across it, and yesterday I found a physical photograph of it which I put on my office door at work.

I hadn't realized it at the time, but it is the same geometry as the zellij tiles I've studied more recently.  I like the patterns that have regular five-pointed stars in them.  These are difficult to have come out right, because 72 degrees really only works well with other pentagon-based shapes, and then the golden mean rears its ugly head and everything starts to look like Penrose Tiles.

Which isn't a bad thing, actually...

More Renderings

I haven't been writing much in this blog, mostly because I've been really busy.

Here's a cylinder of interlocked circles I created in Blender.  I had a sudden insight about how to do it this.  I'd been thinking about carving pumpkins.  Jenn Wild had forwarded me a photo of an insanely carved pumpkin that was a carousel with horses.  I'd been thinking about zillij and how I might use a star-shaped cookie cutter to make a vague kind of Moroccan lamp.  The images must have been bumping around in my head because I figured out that I could use a Boolean intersection to make the individual rings, then use Blender's spin function to make a ring of interlocked circles, then use the array function to stack them.

The whole operation took about 45 minutes.  If I'd tried this a year ago, the rings would have been flat, and I would have spent several days trying to stack everything just so.