Monday, September 27, 2010 3D Portraits at the World Maker Faire 2010

A few of us from the HCCI Computer Clubhouse headed over to the big, gi-mongus DIY fest in Queens to run a little booth making 3d portraits. Anyone who came by our table and wanted to feel the 3d flow got snapped and photoshopped right before their paralaxed eyes (except for the one guy who had no depth perception, poor guy). Anyway, we were busy, as you can see from the photos and only stopped doing portraits when we ran out of glasses. The faire was a blast and if you were there, you probably had an incredible day. If you weren't, there's always the internet...

Your 3d Portrait crew consisted of Omar Diallo, Tyler Glover, John Watkinson, and moi. You shoulda been there.



If you want to try this at home, follow the video tutorial right here on this blog. Enjoy.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Autodesk Donation



I have compiled a list of the Autodesk software that was donated to the Intel Clubhouse Network that would be useful for the development of the movie. This is just a brief description to get familiar with what some of the software donated does.

MUDBOX digital sculpting and texture painting software gives modelers and texture artists the freedom to create production-ready 3D digital artwork without worrying about the technical details.

MOTIONBUILDER enables you to create more and higher quality animation. You can create, edit, and play back complex character animation in a highly responsive, interactive environment that is ideal for high-volume animation, virtual cinematography, pre-visualization, and performance animation.

SOFTIMAGE gives you the ability to quickly and easily create detailed simulated effects, advanced character rigs, and lip-synced facial setups. Enjoy expanded creative control over character animation.

AUTOCAD can be useful in designing and shaping the layout of the movie’s world. By designing the layout of the world it will help in telling the story properly. It will help in setting up the type of environment the character(s) will encounter.

AUTODESK SKETCHBOOK PRO is a painting and drawing software that offers the best-in-class sketching tools for professional designers and artists from all industries. Designed specifically for use with digitized pen tablets and tablet PCs, SketchBook Pro equips you with the tools you need to move easily from pen and paper to a digital environment.

Thursday, September 9, 2010 3D in the Teen Summit

There was a lot of 3D activity in the past Teen Summit in Boston. Here's a sampler:


Fred reports that his "3D Self-Portrait workshop went really well. We had a bunch of kids from all over the place, none of whom had done any 3D photography before. They watched the video tutorial that is up on the blog (and on the village) and then got right to work taking photos of each other and then editing them in Photoshop. In less than 3 hours everyone had a finished, anaglyph (red/blue) 3D image. Most were better than expected, especially for a first-time effort, which was even more impressive considering that they mostly worked on their own from start to finish."

Leontyne shares this about her workshop: "In the "Animate Your World" the teens learned how to do lip-sync animation and import sound into 3ds Max. The task before them was to use the sound recorder to record their voices. After recording their voices, they imported the sound into the software. That's when the fun part began: the teens then animated the facial controllers to match up with the sound bit for the character. This entire process of lip-syncing was fun for teens. Some of them had other teens and a Coordinator do the sound bits in different languages. They had so much fun that they wanted to meet again to keep working on the projects. It was a fun learning experience not just for the teens, but for myself also."

I was at the Augemented Reality workshop led by John de Felipe, from the Museo de los Niños Clubhouse in Colombia and people really enjoyed it. We designed our own planet by modeling a sphere in Blender, then applied to it a "planet" texture that we found online and finally exported it as a dae object that we could see float on top of a piece of paper with a black and white pattern when we put it on front of the webcam. The results are quite surprising.


Freedom lead a workshop using the I-Clone software to create a 3D talk show and commercial. Teens were introduced to how to use the software interface. They also learned the task of taking a picture of themselves, importing the image into the software, and designing a creator that look exactly like themselves. The teens also learned how to do a little bit of acting with their model, along with doing voice over.