Behind the Scenes

Some pictures from behind the scenes of what I talked about in my last post.

Good News and Bad News

So last time I showed you all my experimentation with color. What may or may not have been obvious was that the color scheme studies actually started as a way of ignoring the slight structural problems of the house. The color was a nice distraction for a bit, but eventually I needed to get back to fixing up the house. I worked on all of these imperfections today.

The first thing I did was change the shape of the porch. Having it go around the whole left side of the house wasn't really working out for many reasons, so I ended it right when the back module of the house begins. Then I adapted the railing to fit the new porch. I also finally got the steps in the right position :) And after they where in place, I realized that in order for steps to even be necessary, the house would have to be a bit above the ground in the first place. This elevation also required the wooden under-porch thingy to cover up all the virtual foundation and rat babies. Finally, I positioned the columns in place to keep the little roof up and stable.

After all of this structural work, I wrote in the magic code to add color and, with one little click, it was rendering... After rendering for two and a half house, it was finally done and I realized I had accidentally positioned the camera way to far away...


So then I fixed the camera position and thought it would be a good idea to rotate it a little bit so the sexy little house could show off it's (her?) left side...

Low and behold... I rotated it around the wrong axis... so after 3 hours of rendering, my little house took a dive of shame into the grass...


This was the roller-coaster I took a ride on today. But, to look on the bright side, the house is finished! Now the problem is taking the pictures of it... yay!

TOMORROW I will be posting up the final product!!!!

PS
I forgot about the chimney... I'll put it in tomorrow.

COLOR

As the process of building my house gets further and further to the end, it becomes less and less clear what still needs to get done. I made a chimney, some steps, and I've been playing around with COLOR! I had gotten pretty tired of all the white, hadn't you?

Here is the chimney. I still have to create a material that resembles brick more, but for the purpose of building it, the redPlaster has sufficed. I based it on a picture of a real chimney that I found online and really liked.





Next, I made the steps that will eventually go from the grass or walkway to the porch, which will be elevated a bit above the ground. And as I made these beautiful steps (aren't they?), I realized it would be the perfect time to work on materials and colors. The way I make the colored wooden materials is by looking for a picture online and then setting it as the surface image or grain image of the object. In this case, the steps.


After I had figured out the colors, I started playing around with them :)





My personal favorite.



Please ignore the floating steps. When I positioned them there, I forgot that the house was acutaly scaled to 5 times it's original size, so I miscalculated a bit...


Besides positioning the steps in the right place, my plans for tomorrow include playing around with color some more and working on getting the grass and sky in so that it starts looking more like a scene and less like a floating house.

Enjoy!

PS
I'm also working on another project that's going to be a present for someone close to me. I can't tell you all about right now because said person may or may not be reading my blog, so I'll leave you in suspense!

PPS
Oh! I'm also working on a third project! This one is actually going to involve animation!

Some Old Art

As I was packing up my stuff, I came across these. They're done with colored ink, fountain tips, and the occasional paintbrush to fill in the big areas. I hope you like them!

These were from a circus-themed photo shoot in a fashion magazine.






These are Miss Sixty adds.

Long Post

First of all, Happy Mother's Day! Here are some wildflowers for all my Mommy-Readers :)


Now that that's settled, I can update you all on the progress of my house! As you can see, I'm working on getting the porch roof up and going. Even though it might not look that hard to do, it has been a pain!

Here's a view from a different angle so you can see the shingles on the roof and appreciate the flaws in the porch roof a bit better :P
The red door was just to mix things up a bit until I get to the color-scheme stage of the design.


I thought I would show you the ropes. This is how it is done. I use a scheme-based program called Mead. Mead is an environment for performing simple graphics construction. The system consists of two parts, a front end, a subset of the Scheme language, and the back end an image rendering system, like POV. It is used in a course here at Williams, and will be available on the web and through a live CD, soon. It is also being used in a similar course at Mount Holyoke College. As you can see in the first picture of my code, the door to my house is just made of a billion cubes, scaled and translated to create beauty! You can click on the pictures and zoom in to get a better look.



And now, as promised in my previous post, some Spiro-Art!

--

OK, enough of that. Now it's time to update you on the progress of my grand 3D house project!



They're basically the same shot, the only thing that is a bit different in the second one is the lighting. It's coming along!
Tomorrow I will be focusing on coming up with a nice color scheme, putting the little roof that goes over the porch in place, and probably just adding more details here and there.
I have decided that if I can't settle for one color scheme, I'm going to make it a neighborhood, rather than jusy one house. That way I can have a few different colored houses, who knows!

I will leave you in suspense for now. I bet it's killing all of you (hey mom!)

PS
Just in case anyone was wondering, the cyan background is default. Eventually it will be a beautiful blue sky with perfect-looking fluffy white clouds :)

Also, check out the 1960's Spirograph commercial!

Questionable Content

Hi everyone! (anyone?)
Today I feel like talking about things I like, one of my favorites being Questionable Content.
Questionable Content is a webcomic written and drawn by Jeph Jacques. About a year ago I spent a couple of weeks reading through the archives and eventually caught up. Now I read the new comics Monday through Friday and they really make my day. But one of the main reasons I enjoy it so much is seeing Jeph's progress from the very first comic up until today's new comic.






















Besides the improvement in the artistic quality of the comics, it has an extremely entertaining plot. The characters are funny, witty, adorable, and the situations they get themselves into are hilarious.

I highly recommend reading it!