Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Bluetooth Speaker Project



New Project!

I'm planning on making a bluetooth speaker out of wood, using the same process that I used for a freshman project at DAAP, the monolith project.

I am going for an animal feel to this, trying to give it some personality and also make it something that would look cool sitting on my desk. The guts of this were pulled from a Sony MBS-100 that I picked up off ebay for $10. The wood is leftover from last year and I will be finishing it with either a stain or a clear lacquer. I will probably use my old monolith project as a guinea pig to test finishes.

Next steps:
-Small scale clay mockups
-Pink foam full scale models
-Begin final model

Guts of the Sony MBS-100

"Monolith" project from last year that will serve as my finish guinea-pig

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Freshman Year Digital Design Foundation Work


More work from last year's Digital Design Foundations Class.

Robot project


This was my first foray into modeling in 3D and my first attempt at rendering. The model was created in Google's Sketch-up and was rendered in a free rendering program Kerkythea . As you can see from the render below I didn't really know how to set up my lights properly and ended up having to do a lot of tweaking in Photoshop to get the effect I wanted. As convenient as automatic rendering packages are, I do see the value in manual rendering programs now, and hope to get more comfortable setting up lights, texture, etc. in Alias this Spring.





Movie Poster

Our final Photoshop project, we were asked to create a movie poster. I went for a terminator themed, cyborg movie.

I may revisit this project now that I am more comfortable modeling in 3D, and will not have to rely on source images for the robotic skeleton.



Some old work and the "5% Rule"


It's been almost a year since I've looked at my freshman drawing work. Brings back some good memories of all-nighters re-sharpening prisma color pencils. The first thing that is painfully obvious to me now is that so many of my drawings from last year are missing that last 5%. That last 10 minutes of work to tune up, redefine edges, tweak values, etc. I'm tempted to dig some of these out of my closet and spend ten minutes finishing them up when I get back to Cincinnati. I have a tendency to work in huge, continuous chunks and not take the time to remove myself from what I'm doing and come back with fresh eyes. When you work like this it's hard to make that last 5% meaningful. Lesson learned, hopefully.

Thanks to my professor Jason Franz for all his great instruction last year.
Check out his work, and the awesome gallery and studio he founded.