3D


Post Industrial backgrounds 2

Spinneyhead’s tail grows a little more. The original Post Industrial backgrounds set was popular, so I went out and took some more pictures of decaying Manchester for you to use in the backgrounds of renders. (May require Animotions membership to view.)

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Spinneyhead's short tail

I mentioned my long tail plans for Spinneyhead in an earlier post. If you look in the right hand column you’ll see links to all the places that sell my products, but I think a quick rundown here is in order.

There’s the shop, of course, though it doesn’t list everything.

Small Scale Customs sells products for modellers, particularly of vehicles in 1:72nd/1:76th scale.

Discontinuous Infill is an e-zine I did a couple of years ago.

The Spinneyhead store at Cafe Press stocks the infamous “Must not mention sheep” T-shirt and more. The Home Roasting Cafe Press store makes fun of Starbucks and all the anti piracy hysteria from the record and movie industries.

My Renderosity store stocks stuff I’ve made for 3d and 2d computer art. At present the only product is a set of backgrounds for renders. At 1600×1200 pixels I’m sure some of the pictures would make good desktops. You’ll need to be a member (free) to buy.

The Deviantart store sells prints, mousemats and postcards of some of my art.

And of course, I’m producing new stuff all the time. There’s another set of backgrounds waiting to be zipped up and uploaded to Renderosity and more products planned for Small Scale Customs.

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New Product- Woodland Backgrounds

I’ve got my first product listed on Renderosity. It’s a selection of woodland and park background photos for Poser renders and other images. There are fourteen images at 1600 by 1200 pixels, each in three versions- the image and two levels of blur to simulate depth of field.

Poser 6 allows you to set depth of field in renders and will blur the foreground and background for you but, after waiting nearly fourteen hours for a scene to render, I figured that it’s sometimes simpler to cheat. So the depth of field images can be set as the background for portraits and headshots, and could be useful for keeping attention focussed on the action in a comic strip.


IanP’s English Woodland backgrounds

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The Adventures of a Dead Man in a Spacesuit

Another of my upcoming webcomic projects, this one is due before Tiger. In fact, depending upon the work I get done today, it may debut next week.

Adrift is a computer generated comic, done in Poser and with postwork in Photoshop and Illustrator.

I’m still working on the Mongrels universe. It’s sort of post Singularity, with self aware AIs getting citizenship rights and evolving to the point where they run their affairs like corporations. The AIs are patrons to the Mongrels, humans with nanotechnology that enhances their abilities, who exist to protect them against luddite humans and other humans from rogue AIs. (No AI believes it could ever be a rogue computer, of course, but they worry that others might be.) There are a load of other elements I want to include and I’m going to write a more complete bible and start encouraging others to contribute to the shared world.

Less gabbing, must go away and get rendering.

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Bladerunner future here we come

A laser display unit b eing developed in Japan could make floating 3d projections a reality. It utilises an ionisation effect that happens when laser light is focused to a point in air. The beam is invisible to the human eye but, if the intensity of the laser pulse exceeds a threshold, the air breaks down into glowing plasma that emits visible light.

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i really should be at home

Note This post was e-mailed from my phone at about half past three on Wednesday afternoon. The one below it was sent some time after that. Sometimes mobile e-mail is a little freaky like that.

I still haven’t been able to make changes to the database. It’s a ten minute job but i’ve now been waiting a day and a bit for people to get their arses in gear. I should be at home working on cool stuff.
For instance-
I’ve come up with an idea for a domestic rain water buffer. It would sit at the bottom of the downspout and hold water for its built in plant pot. The pots would reduce run off and improve air quality, and they could be made from mostly recycled items such as old car tires.
There are companies in the uk who will do 3d printing from supplied files. I need to look into this as a method for prototyping models and other stuff.


Announcing Two Wheels Good and Render

Two new Spinneyhead blogs have launched this week.

Two Wheels Good is about bikes. It’s a home for the stuff that’s too specifically about cycling for How to Save the World for Free and too sedate for Gravity. When I get my new camera and video camera I hope to start doing vblogs on commuting, riders and their bikes and, if I can finally find that workshop, building your own bike.

Render is about 3d modelling. After Christmas I hope to be creating comics using Poser and other 3d packages and the blog will start filling up with examples and tutorials as well as news and reviews.

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call for artists

I’m still looking for artists to help on my web comics. I’m going to wrap deputised experts up with a very brief all cg epilogue. I’ll return to the characters in the new year. My next project is the berlin job, an alternate history tale. I’ve got it plotted at 60 pages and i’ve started doing the layouts. This is going to be much more hand drawn, with computer aid for the finishing and possibly colouring. I’ve also got ideas for an adult comic done in cg for mary tales and i’m learning how to use poser just for it.
But i have more ideas, far more than i could hope to draw myself. So i’m looking for collaborators, specifically for a project called ‘mongrels’. It’s a post singularity tale of the cyborgs who keep the peace between humanity and the machines. I’ll script, you’ll draw. At the very least you’ll get something for your portfolio, but there’ll also be a share of subscription and advertising income.


Poser Creator interviewed

I just bought the new version of Poser, the 3D figure creation and rendering program that is my main cheat for laying out comics panels and getting characters consistently in proportion and relative size. The package is in its sixth iteration and celebrating its tenth anniversary. To celebrate the milestone the program’s creator sat down with e-frontier to discuss his background, work and interests.

First of all, let’s talk about the evolution of Poser. I know that you have a background in animation, and have animation royalty in your family. Can you discuss a bit about your family, education and also your animation experience?

My grandfather, who I never got the chance to meet, was Dave Fleischer. He, along with his brother Max Fleischer, created and ran Fleischer Studios from the 1920s to the 1940s. Dave was credited with directing all the Betty Boop, Popeye, and Koko The Clown cartoons, as well as the features Gulliver’s Travels and Hoppity Goes To Town. My grandfather actually was Koko the clown. He was filmed wearing a clown suit for the animations they would then rotoscope (which they invented and patented).

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Poser 6

Now that I’ve commited myself again to having a go at producing a webcomic, I really ought to get a copy of Poser 6. especially if it does all the cool stuff it claimns to to make cartooning easier. I’ve got Poser 4 and have been using it to pose the characters for DEx. Being able to render out in cartoon style would cut a lot of time from the production.

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Goldfish Bowl

The Perspecta is a spherical display device that shows moving 3 dimensional images that can be walked around and viewed from many angles. I’m waiting for the first gaming application. Imagine 3D Quake where the person on the other side of the sphere can tell you what’s hiding behind the wall. (Or be what’s hiding behind the wall, I suppose.)

Several applications have already emerged. Two oil companies, three medical centres and the US air force have bought or loaned Perspectas and are using them respectively to visualise slices of the Earth’s crust from seismic data, human organs from MRI and CT scans, and squadrons of aircraft from radar data.

This is a big step forward from rotating a 3D computer image on a flat screen, Favalora says. Nothing beats being able to walk all the way around the object, view it from the top and zoom in whenever you want, he claims.

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