A Girl and Her Zuni

After looking at it a lot, I decided to make a few changes to my Zuniceritops work. The big differences are that I added a girl in a white dress (remember this is art not science) and a mountain in the background. I also changed the lighting and colors up a bit.

Zuniceratops

Just a picture I did to play around with fall colors. This was all done in Vue.

My first youtube video

I made a presentation on an idea I had called a Tower Farm. I used Vue to generate all of the slides.

A Tower Farm is essentially a greenhouse taken to the level of a skyscraper. Crops are grown inside using aeroponics, a process of growing plants without soil. The internal environment has controlled levels of water and carbon dioxide, fed by attached tanks, for superior crop yields. Being a sealed environment, it does not loose water to evaporation, and it is pest free. A Tower Farm is built in arid, agriculturally deficient region where crops cannot currently be grown without a great deal of wasted irrigation water, expensive fertilizer, and harmful pesticides. It is constructed with glass walls and floors for maximum use of sunlight and reduces its power consumption by taking advantage of solar panels located on the roof. A loading dock on the bottom story makes it easy to transport harvested crops away from the site. The concept is also scalable as numerous Tower Farms can be built in clusters and to varying heights.

Ogre Shawl

I wanted to make a picture with a wild looking ogre. I wanted to give him a bit of furs for clothing so I decided to create some on my own. In order to prepare, I loaded Poser, deleted the default figure and added in the Greater Troll character available from Daz3d. After turning off the inverse kinematics, I opened the joint editor and zeroed the figure. Then, I exported him as an obj. The point of this is to be able to use the object as a frame of reference.



I loaded blender then imported the ogre obj file. Then I added a filled in circle just above his shoulders.



After multi-subdividing all of the internal edges 12 times (the ones going to a point in the middle), I deleted all of the internal faces that intersected the ogre’s head and moved some individual vertices to smooth the opening a bit. With Proportal Edit Falloff on, I then moved some of the outer vertices to give it a rough edge.





Then, I deleted the ogre, leaving only the shawl. I then created a UV map for it and gave it a fur texture from a jpg I found on the web. I exported it as an obj, then imported it into Poser. I created a copy of the UV Map jpeg in black and white and used it for the bump map. After running it through a cloth simulation I got the image below.

Space Elevator

I've always been interested in the idea of a space elevator. Today CNN has an article on it. What I like most of all those is the nice rendered picture they included. I always like seeing my favorite form of art in action. Click here to see the CNN article Here's the pic: