Day 0050 – Reflection

October 30, 2010, 7:08 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Holy fun. Super challenging but very rewarding. A couple of cool projects I have been working on.

First, update on the web front. Got the first draft of the website up and running. Using HTML (I am using Text Wrangler for markup. It is easy to understand for novices.) and Adobe Dreamweaver to help with layout. I like it a lot, but now that I have Phase I complete, I can think of a million updates I would like to implement. Check it out at www.coberlin.com.

Second, update on Action Script 3.0. Scripting is the reason I stay up late every night. Luckily I am slowing starting to see the patterns of code language. It has been a struggle but I am happy to say I finished the Beta version of my first ‘game’. It is a drag and drop Flash based piece of Generative Art. The characters you can make are so darn cute. I will update to my website, so you can try it out.

Final update, I finished my ‘Still Life’ project. I was excited to play around with Maya again. I hadn’t use the program in about 4 years and was feeling very rusty. It was a long process but was a great way to explore ways to use all the tools at my finger tips to be creative. For this project I used Photoshop, Illustrator, tradition media(photography and drawing) and Maya.

First we had to document the still life with what ever tools we had in one hour. I used my digital SLR, Photoshop, a Wacom tablet and my iPhone video camera to capture as much reference as I could. Here is a quick sample:

It was an absurd collection of a two headed skeleton, a cat treat jar in the shape of a kitty that meowed when opened, a plant, ceramic church, fruit, and an ferret pelt. Crazy, right? I was drawn to it instantly. The coolest thing I noticed was when I looked very close at the photographs, you could see the pixel grid from the projector that we were using to project the blue light.

I came up with the idea of recreating the still life in Maya and then creating a custom ‘grid’ to use as a light source for the render. First I created grid in Illustrator and used the hollow point tool to remove certain parts of the grid. I chose to use concentric circles in the grid to represent one point perspective. I then printed out grids and went back into them with a pen and eventually an Exacto blade, splicing different grid papers. This took a lot longer than I thought, but the repetitiveness of the process was kind of relaxing. Here are some of the artwork used to create projection grid.

The final stage was to build Maya model and cast new light source so it would wrap around digital shapes. I chose to simplify the composition and focus on the Kitty, which I also reduce to it’s essence. Here is the final render. I would love to explore this technique some more in the near future. Really happy with results and process.