I have made the little goth girl, so obviously if I am going to do any animation with her in it, I need a graveyard.

The graveyard will be a small family plot which will be behind Ed’s castle. The goth girl is the daughter of Ed’s neighbour, so of course the girl is Ed’s neighbour too.

The building below will be at the end of the cemetary. I started with this one first because it would be the most work. It took only about 3 hours to make from start to finish including all textures. It could be taken a lot further, detail-wise, but it won’t be seen very well in the dark, and won’t be seen up close, so I have to choose my battles to make sure I don’t waste time doing things that won’t be seen or noticed.

The building is very low poly, it renders in just a few seconds. It could easily be used in a game engine.

It shouldn’t take long to make some tombstones and graves. I’ll then add some old dead/spooky trees and grass, rig the girl so she can be animated, then create the animation.

Here are the images, click on each one to see the large size:

The year is 1882 and the Baldwin Locomotive Company have just finished making their latest “Iron Horse”. For the first time the steam train exits the factory to await collection by the new owner.

I finally finished the train scene that I started last year. I only had enough RAM to make the stream train then, without the tender. Now that I have a better computer, I can do more things.

Please click on the image to view it at the large size.

My wife thinks she should be called Marilyn.

I’ve had the idea for this character for a long time and have been looking forward to getting around to it. There are a couple more characters I’m looking forward to creating as well. In my mind I have many ideas for some sort of series of shows, featuring Igor and Ed (still not finished) who are closely like the Igor-Mad Violinist characters, except Ed might be more calm.

I don’t want to say much about this show idea publicly, in case people with more resources than I like the idea and run with it. I can say bits and pieces. Living next door to Ed is a kind of mysterious lady with a spooky daughter. The character I have modeled in this post is the daughter. Actually I made the mother a couple of months ago, but she doesn’t have any clothes yet. This girl likes to spend time in Ed’s family cemetary that’s behind Ed’s castle, at the edge of the forest. She will carry a teddy bear that will have no head. She seems to like Igor, but Igor is scared of her. To Ed, the mother and daughter are “the freaks next door”, though they seem harmless to me.

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Finally I have something to show, a new character I am making. I started this in December, it isn’t finished, but it’s at a stage worth showing.

Back in December I started learning organic modeling which is quite different to the hard surface modeling I was doing before. There are no straight lines, and reference images are less useful. If you model a face from a reference photo from the front, and the side profile EXACTLY, the modeled face will still look different to the original face if all the other curves (which can’t be exactly followed from 2D photos) are not the same. I didn’t care too much about matching any face, I just wanted A face.

I started off with reference photos because I wanted the proportions to be correct. The eyes need to be the right size and in the right part of the head. The nose needs to be a certain length and the mouth in the right place. It’s so easy to make one face look different just by moving a few vertices slightly. Think about how many billions of different faces there are in the world on heads which are all the same general size and shape (within a few centimetres anyway). Small variations over this small area can create an unlimited amout of faces. After a bit of tweaking, I settled on this one.

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Take the fake or foto challenge. All you do is answer whether the image you are looking at is a fake (3d model) or real.

Link: Fake or Foto

What you do is go to the link above and click on each image to see a larger image to study, then click the image again to go back to the original page, then click your answer.

Here are the results I got:

I took a 50/50 guess on the eye, but I was sure my answer for the kitchen/stairs would have been right. Oh well.

I modeled a 1934 model of an Auburn Speedster this week. I intend to use this for a character I am working on, called Ed.

Just over a week ago I hadn’t heard of this car, or seen it. I did a google image search for classic cars and saw this car straight away and thought it would be great for my character. I found the blueprints at the-blueprints.com and a lot of reference images.

I made most of this car in just three days, last Frday to Sunday, but I only did the final touches today. The main reason I got it done so fast was because I gave myself permission to deviate from the blueprints as much as I wanted. I liked the car, but I wasn’t going to spend ages looking for references for every little thing if I couldn’t see what a part looked like. I spent hours and hours looking for references when making my steam train and Model T Ford, but I just wanted a car for my character that had a certain look, and it didn’t need to be an exact replica.

As it turns out, the end result is very close to the original anyway. The blueprints were clear enough, and it was easy to find good quality references. The car doesn’t have anywhere near as many parts to make as the steam train or Ford, and I didn’t bother making anything that couldn’t be seen, such as the engine or fuel tank. I need to add some windscreen wipers though, I think it looks a little bare without them. Also, I haven’t thought about how I want the dashboard to look yet, so it will be made later. I want a futuristic type thing with a screen. It won’t be anything like the original.

I think I might change the wheel spokes to a more hot rod rim like in this photo:

I have deliberately kept my windscreen as a single piece of glass, all of the references (like the one above) have it divided. It would be a simple thing to divide it, but I am worried about the partition getting in the way of the “camera” during animation, obscuring the face of Ed. I’ll see, I can remake it if the original windscreen looks better.

Click on the images below to see the larger sizes:

Below are a couple of images with Ed, who is still a work in progress. I’m not sure what’s happened with the lighting on him, his skin looks like he died last week. He won’t look like this when he is finished.

Below are some reference images I used:

Today I composited my model T Ford into a photo I took when I was in Stockholm. I’m sure I must have better background photos than this, but this will do now for the sake of the exercise. 3d environments can be made for 3d models, or they can be just pasted into a photo or movie scene.

This was pretty easy to do, I just imported the photo into 3ds max, and manipulated the grid floor in 3ds Max to lay flat on the ground in the photo to get the right perspective. I moved the sun to where it needs to be to get the right shadow, and rendered. This renders the car by itself, with the shadow, and everything else is transparent. Then it’s a simple job to paste this rendered image over the photo in Photoshop, and do a bit of colour correcting so that the white balance is the same, and it’s done.

Here is what it looked like with the transparent background (checkerboard pattern indicates transparency)

Below is a colour and black and white version of the composite. Click the images to see larger sizes.

It’s just my first play with this, I should hopefully be able to do more interesting things in the future with this sort of thing.

I modeled the Mad Violinist castle room in 3D which makes it much more useful than the 2D photo background I had in my videos before. This means that I don’t have to do any tedious masking whenever a character goes back behind the archway. The geometry for the hall behind the arch is real, a camera could go around there, characters can come from there very easily and naturally, without me having to do any extra work.

Here is a preview, click the link below it to read more.

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I have been studying fluid dynamics for a little while now with 3ds max, having bought the Allan McKay Fumefx DVDs, but only now do I have enough computing power to do anything. In this blog entry, I’ll give a preview of something I’ve come up with as part of an idea I have for a Mad Violinist episode where Igor shows how his junky coffee machine works.

I wanted a steam effect, where the steam comes from the cup and goes downwards, like with dry ice. I’d say there might be something wrong with the machine if the coffee is this cold. Also the colour looks a bit toxic.

Click here to see the preview clip (2.83mb)

Finally I have a new computer. It has an i7 processor, with 8gb RAM, and 3ds Max works like a dream compared to my old computer. The first thing I did was open a train scene which my old computer couldn’t open. My wife’s computer could open it, but couldn’t render an image because memory errors would crash 3ds Max as soon as the render button was pressed. The train images I rendered in the past for my blog could only be rendered if I rendered about 20 thin strips, and then they’d be automatically stitched together at the end to make the final image.

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