Just two left :)

I’m running to the end of my exams, finishing my math and geography today with just two sciences left on wednesday and friday.
I ordered my new computer on sunday, taking advantage of a football related offer in the local newspaper to same me some cash. Linux is coming closer to a reality for me, as the estimated time for delivery is the 28th of this month. The expected arrival is a pentium 4 ( 64 bit says dell.com, but I doubt it) running at 2.8Ghz. I had the option of a celleron 3.21something Ghz but it only had a 533mhz front side bus compared to the 800mhz of the pentium , which I feel will make more of a difference. It is a compact 3100c. other stats are 2x256mb ram, 80gb HD and best of all a 17″ screen TFT. which may not sound that much but originally I could only afford to get 15″ TFT, so this is a pleasant surprise. dell also chucked in a free printer, but no USB cable to connect it, which cost a whopping £15 but I didn’t go for it, seeing the con. This all totaled as good as £400 by the time it would get to my door. Installed already is ms windows (the OS) and ms works (bunch of crap) both of which I will remove or replace.
I have decided to duel-boot, instead of removing windows completely because I have paid for it and do not want to just destroy it completely. When I start my computer I’ll partition the 80gb HD into three, the windows section will be about 15GB, which is easily enough to work with, the ubuntu section will be about 55Gb being the main section to use. the remanning 10GB will be spare, used as a shared drive or to install other versions of linux.

Those dam triangles…

Late last night I had some spare time, in which I wanted to model something in AOI because I had not done for such a long time. I started looking on the internet for illusions. one of the frequent occurrences was the illusion of an impossible 3D like triangle with right-angles coming of it so it could not work. You have probably seen there before somewhere.

my first attempt was just a quick mock up. I just picked a corner and decided to make the rest as it appeared, leaving the last corner not touching. Here is what I came up with. (design 1)

It does not look very good, the illusion kinda works
I made a small animation of the triangle shrinking down to a cube.

To try and improve the Illusion I tried texturing it a bit more to try and show how there were no bent lines.

The grid lines on the ‘L’ side are aligned but the other are not. Trying to fix this did not work so well

Now it is the other way around. and not any better.
Trying to align the camera was tricky, in the end I worked out that it could not be done. The POV (persistence of vision) was making the front end of the triangle seem bigger than the back side and so it would not work anyway.
I closed down the field of view down to 5º, this remove the problem a bit. but there was still the annoying ‘L’ shaped side that should not be there. I tried redesigning my shape. But I did not get anywhere fast.
Looking up ‘impossible triangle’ in google attracted a few image to my attention, they showed how other people had made it. There were cut outs in part of the front edge.
The next time I did my model I made it to scale with correct sided edges. I turned on ‘snap to grid’ to help.
I also redone the texture to look like the grids chopped it up into lots of cubes.

on this there is no ‘L’ side but the effect is lost as with bad alignment.
At this point I made a PME template out of the shape. I thought it could be useful, But although it make perfectly aligned triangles it was difficult to texture. And when rendering with GI the non-joining edge just look apart. Here are the two examples with the floor just out of view below the triangle and above respectively.

I decided not to use the template as I still wanted to give it a grid like look. I went back to my scale model. I made a texture that was used the checker pattern for each different colour, then applied this to the triangle. I did an overnight render as it was getting late so I set the size up to 800*600 and upped the quality lots. This morning I woke up to find this image.

Now I just wanted to refine this to be perfect. there is a small overlap at the top edge and the top square is a mushy grey. The floor seem to be too far away so I move it up a bit.
A small rest render OK’d.

So without further ado here is the final piece.

Click to enlarge 🙂
The scene file is here made with Art Of Illusion 2.3

I made a quick animation of how it works ( a flyby of the object) render with the raster engine.

Animating The Wheel

My wheel was successful and a couple of users wanted to see what it was like animated. This was surprisingly easy and only took about 10 min to do.

My Square Wheel

For a contest at friendlyskies, called ‘Re-invent the wheel’ I made an entrant.
I chose to pick up on a Square wheel theme.
I made a mock up picture of what I wanted up my wacom tablet (lost the image *sorry*)
But in total it too about 20 min to complete including texturing and lighting.
I rendered it with a bit a GI to get a nice look under the wheel itself.

Click to enlarge 🙂

A bit about me

Wow. It’s been ages from when I last used this site. As a bit of an update, I’ve just now finished 6th form and need to just do some of the remain exams. I hope to be off to lancaster uni this September.