Okay, I admit that lighting isn’t my strong suit. I’m good with geometry and scripting. But I struggle making the images look as good as they should. These photos are my attempts to try to get better colors and realistic lighting from POV-Ray.
Cube Dudes and Seagull
I’ve been having a lot of fun lately creating LEGO POV-Ray models and I thought I’d share! Brink Link was nice enough to post instructions for the SDCC 2010 Cube Dudes which I had to model! I’ve finished R2-D2 and C-3PO and they look great!
Having a Few Words with Wordle
I ran across Wordle while pursuing other Flickr photos. I was intrigued and decided to give it a whirl. I’d been avoiding installing Java on my machine due to my distaste for the poorly coded apps that tend to use it, but my desire to give Wordle a try overcame my desire to remain Java free. I ran it against my site with interesting results.
Watermelon
Here is my take on LEGO Stores Watermelon Monthly Mini Model Build for July. This model screams Summer and one just didn’t seem enough. Playing around with better lighting, fog to soften light and JPEG artifacts, and a bit of focal blur thrown in for good measure.
New and Old Models
I uploaded a couple of LEGO renders today, a new one and an old one.
Going Chrome, But not by Choice
I’ve been having a bit of a problem lately getting Safari to keep working! Seems it keeps crashing every few minutes with a library issue that I can’t seem to fix.
21006 White House
This is the wonderful 21006 White House. I love the look and did my best to recreate it, but I’m sure things aren’t quite the same. I didn’t finish the back yet, so don’t turn it around.
344 Bungalow
I found a number of old models from 1969 and rendered many last year, including this one. I finally got around to rendering larger a larger version with a better background (originally it has a seam in the back). If you search for this, you'll find that I fudged the trees and used something newer.
Fun with Z-Code (aka Inform)
Okay, I’ve been a fan of adventure games, and specifically Infocom games, for most of my life. I have fond memories of playing great games such as “Planet Fall” and “Zork” when I was in high school on my C64. However, even before playing those games, I was playing and writing games on my ZX81 using a very simple adventure engine.
Fun with iOS 4
I’ve been waiting patiently to upgrade my iPod Touch to iOS4 today. Now, as a long time network engineer, IOS has always been Cisco’s CLI. So, it was a bit weird installing iOS on an Apple product. But in the end, it was worth the wait and the install. Some common issues I had with the previous
357 Fire Station
I rendered this a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d share. This is LEGO(R) Model 357 Fire Station with Vehicles from 1973. I’d like to create a more “action oriented” version in the future, but it is pretty nice to begin with. I personally like the middle engine with the two yellow rounds. It was the reason I rendered the model to begin with.
Making My Blog CO2 Neutral, and You Can Too
Here’s an interesting idea, plant a tree and offset the carbon emissions produced by your blog. And, even better, you can make it happen for free! That is the premise behind Mach's grün's Carbon Neutral campaign. Just blog about their initiative and the “Arbor Day Foundation,” their partner in the US, will plant a tree in the Plumas National Forest on your behalf.
Are You a Nerd or a Geek?
This funny article was tweeted by Major Nelson and it was too rich not to pass on. FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram provides a visually comprehensive way to determine the correct usage of those oft hard to pick social epitaphs you are bound to throw my way.
CSS Fun and Standards
I’ve playing around with other CMS systems lately to get a feel for what is out there. I recently had the opportunity to hack around in WordPress and ran across a neat little utility in some of their docs. It is an external Online CSS Optimiser/Optimizer that does some CSS compression.
Flickr LEGO Fun
Flickr has become my new favorite place to share my LEGO creations. I tend to use Facebook for family and friends, mainly because that is what my family and friends use. But I digress. It is pretty easy now to use available tools, mine being Windows Live Photo Gallary, that allow easy publishing. That means more time building and less time cropping and uploading. In all, a good use of technology.
All Is Well In 64bit Land
Well, I’m finding the 64bit version of Windows 7 works pretty well. I have most of my applications running again, using the 64bit versions if I could find them. The SSD drive is working great and I'm just using an external drive enclosure to get around the space limitations.
64bit and SSD Fun!
I was honored with a 128GB SSD drive today and I just had to give it a try. Since I can only have one drive in my laptop, I decided I’d swap out the old one and, while I was at it, spin up a 64bit version of Windows 7 on it as well. I’m curious to see how things will work.
Fly Me To The Moon Soundtrack
I uploaded a slightly longer version of the “Fly Me To the Moon” song to ACIDplanet.com. It isn’t much of a soundtrack since there is only one song. I created this version first but it was too long for the animation. The shorter version in the video was an edited remix of this one.
Fly Me To The Moon
Playing around with POV-Ray animation. This is LEGO model 367 Lunar Lander. I’m trying to be a bit more ambitious with camera sweeps, using easing functions and launching the lander into space!
Promotional Windmill 1976
I finally got around to trying my hand again at animating some of my virtual LEGO creations. I decided to go simple and animate the vanes and a simple camera pan for the promotional Windmill circa 1976. And, to really get my geek on, I uploaded it to YouTube.
5865 Mini Dumper
This is LEGO® model 5865 MiniDumper, part of the 2009 Creator series. I thought it looked really cool and was curious how close I could get to the original by building a virtual one.
Halo Reach Music
Bungie just released the snippet of soundtrack for the premier trailer: Lone Wolf. The iTunes purest in me couldn’t live with the default no album art found image, so I created one! Here is the Halo: Reach album art at 640x640. And no, I didn’t bother to add any text.
Reflective Fun
I’ve been using Reflection.js for some time now to generate reflective category images. I did this mainly to avoid having to create the reflections by hand. However, it has always had a bit of a lag when generating the reflections. This can be a bit jarring at times, but I’ve gotten used to it.
Fixing Code
I really haven’t liked the way the code routine displays on my blog. It adds a lot of white space and generally looks bad. To make things a bit nicer, I removed the Code: message, set the overflow to auto instead of scroll, and I removed the extra breaks.
Avoiding Index
One thing that always bugged me with using scripts is that you tend to see the script name. For example, this site has always had an index.cgi and most PHP sites have index.php in the links. I find it tacky and many commercial sites don’t do this. I don’t want to change my software, so there has to be a way around this problem. The search is on!