2012
Ditto for Lithium.
08/18/12 06:07 PM Filed in: Sculptures
Doing the turnaround for the Lithium sculpture had some interesting challenges. The plexiglass itself had a darkish almost greenish tint to it and some parts of the pillbox was clear plexiglass. I also wanted to use more shots for the turnaround. Oh, and I decided to do 2 turnarounds, one for the pill and the second for the final Saturday portion of the pillbox.
Each one has 24 shots and I did this because there was more information that I wanted to convey. With the Lithium pill I wanted to show what was contained inside each halve, to have a cutaway view if you will. And with the pillbox I wanted to have one revolution where the lid comes up and the viewer can see the pill inside more clearly. As with the Bust turnaround I used Joe Workman's 360 Degree Stack in the same manner.
I also added a top banner image that shows some of the preliminary artwork I did for the sculpture and also photos of what the entire piece looked like. Check it out in my Sculptures menu or just click here.
Bust Turnaround Finally Completed...
08/13/12 11:02 AM Filed in: Sculptures
This wasn't that difficult. Tedious maybe, but I was surprised how smooth and fast it went, once I got the first shot down. I went to IKEA's and bought a 14 inch marble Lazy Susan to use as the turntable. I thought that 12 shots would be about right so I divided that into 360 and I marked off 30 degree increments.
The Green Screen was something that I had but had never really did anything with and I was too lazy to iron it out or pull it taut. Didn't matter though, it was easy enough to up the tolerance setting on the magic wand tool in Photoshop and get a mask in pretty short order. Then I just deleted the green background, dealt with some of the green spillage on the head itself with the Hue/Saturation command and dropped a gray stripe on the highlighted side of her face.
I then used Joe Workman's 360 Degree Stack and uploaded all 12 shots to my server. The finished turnaround can be found here. Next up my Lithium sculpture.
Wacom Cintiq Set Up
07/17/12 07:00 AM Filed in: Hardware
Yes, I lusted over the Wacom Cintiq 24HD and the 21UX but they were way out of my budget so I settled, uh, found a great deal on a Cintiq 12WX! Actually the smaller size wasn't an issue for me because I had been using an Intuos 3 4x6" tablet. That makes the Cintiq look big in comparison. One of the benefits of having the 12WX is that it is based on the Intuos 3 line. The pen, drivers, programmable buttons are all the same. I am able to use the Intuos Grip Pen and the 6D Art Pen with the Cintiq. So, I was able to have one grip pen with the brush nib and the second grip pen with a felt nib and programed both switches the same.
The one thing that I really didn't care for was the display stand. I found a bunch of users on YouTube that were mounting their Cintiq's on monitor arms. I bought an LCD monitor arm from Ergotron and it works fairly well. It supports up to 22 pounds and the Cintiq is only 4.5 pounds.
360 Degree Stack is Awesome!
07/12/12 09:51 AM Filed in: Software
I bought Joe Workman's 360 degree stack for Rapidweaver a couple of days ago. I intend to use it to do turnarounds for some of my old sculptures but I see that it could also be useful in other ways. With my Vaudeville business card I can use the 360 degree stack so that one can use the mouse to pull the tab back and forth. It can be seen on the Vaudeville page.
AXELedge
07/06/12 12:14 PM Filed in: Software
Mindavenue's AXELedge was a program that was created back in 1999. There were many apps that were trying to do Web 3D. To be able to have interactive 3D within a browser like Explorer or Safari. I had a lot of fun with this app and did many tutorials that I posted online and even had two published tutorials in a magazine.
Mindavenue did not last long though, as they fell on hard times and the program was bought (and effectively terminated) by another company. Over the years there have been programs that have come out like Swift 3D, Papervision 3D and the like which have brought 3D to Flash. And then there are other options like Unity 3D for doing games or apps.
When I was doing an inventory of all of my old tutorials for AXEL, it made me smile and remember how much I enjoyed using this program. It is a defunct app, and the tutorials are of no use to anybody at this late date, but I have showcased some of my AXEL work in the Animation section.