The Ambigram printed in 3D

I received yet another order from Shapeways! This time I had decided to prepare two different 3D printable versions of my own signature logo of sorts: the Ambigram.

The actual symbol is a design that I made for myself already back in 2009. It's a stylized version of my first name with lots of sharp edges. The catch with these so-called ambigrams is that they look exactly the same when viewed from a different angle i.e. rotated upside down..

I also wanted to try out two different materials: the smaller one is made out of stainless steel and the other out of polished white plastic. I have to say that especially the metal one looks very cool!

Here's the page of the final product:

Ambigram model @ Shapeways

I have to note that it was not just a simple extrusion but a truly three-dimensional piece. The actual letters stick out a bit and they are slightly bevelled. I used Blender 3D for all the modeling work as usual. The objects had to be all made watertight and then scaled into appropriate versions. Once again it took me a few tries to make the models pass all the printing requirements..

I had already decided to use the steel one as badge so I went to a local craft supply store earlier today and bought a couple of these pieces that are attached into every badge:

Then I added a thin layer of black fabric to hide them.

Here's how the thing turned out:

Finally, I attached the badge to my leather bag. Looking good if I might say so!

On a final note, I wanted to see how easy it is to paint plastic prints with acrylic paints.

Turns out the paint sticks very well with no issues. After a few layers of paint white print turned out like this:

My plan is to start sculpting action figures or tiny busts/portraits someday and then possibly paint them by hand.

It seems that 3D printing is the way to go if I want to make multiple cost-efficient copies.

Now how about that!

Progress report - June

Here it is: the very first glimpse on my "secret" summer project.

It's just that I don't usually like to reveal too much about work that is incomplete.

However, I'm confident with this one.

Ok, so it's a music video.. but also a more cinematic story inspired by graphic novels, game cutscenes and such!

And yes, it's going to be all CG made with Blender.

But let's face it: almost 4 minutes in total this animation project is going to be nearly an entire half of a ten minute short film!

It's insane amount of work but I really want to see how far I'm able to push my skills: not working only on a still image or one shot but multiple scenes instead!

So far I've finished working on six individual shots or sequences of the story.

I've had to model all the assets and props, craft simple environments and animate the scene to be able to render final composite images.

There's also simulations to deal with such as leaves in the opening sequence and smoke in various scenes. Lots of things that require some further tweaking.

And I still have more environmental modeling left to do for the rest of the shots.

Here's some of the completed final frames in HD resolution.

Some of them may eventually change a bit...

The cover art design from my previous post!

Closeup of the wheels in motion

Wide view of the desolate landscape

This one seems spooky enough

Highway to Hell... sort of

One of the more climatic shots

And a behind the scenes screenshot of the mess I'm dealing with, ugh.

Wait for more to come!

Imaginary cover art for The Riff

Inspired by the visual style of graphic novels I decided to create a new non-photorealistic 3D illustration using Blender. This is also going to be featured in my summer project that I'm currently working on if all goes well. Here's the final result:

This imaginary cover art illustration is based on the lyrics of a heavy rock song called The Riff by my favorite band Lordi. I try not to do too much fanart nowadays but I felt that the lyrics alone gave me enough freedom to use my own ideas! The lyrics tell a vague story about a man that gets picked up by Mr. Death himself driving an old Chevy. The grim reaper takes the narrator on a dreamlike road trip that ends up in a car crash: The reaper bites the dust but the man survives.

To start off I've been modeling the Chevrolet Impala 1959 convertible car model from scratch for quite some time. It's one of those things that every 3D modeler has to go through at least once in their time. Not to mention the fact that Industrial Designers are usually car freaks.. even though I'm not that much. Creating the car replica was a project on its own that I've been working on and off in my spare time. Every detail is modeled by hand based on various reference photos that I found online.

I used MakeHuman to create a generic male character that fits the role of the narrator. However I had to tweak the weighting of the rig to make it work correctly inside Blender. The grim reaper was made using an existing skeleton 3D model from blendswap.com that I then customised further: I modeled the horns, the ragged robe and attached a pair of sunglasses that I had already created by myself.

To create the two-toned look of the rendered images I used a non-photorealistic shader. All that I have in the scenes is one sun lamp that provides even illumination from one uniform direction. The final shade of the surfaces is based on the illumination and is either black or white.

Here's a couple of viewport views inside Blender:

The final image compositing was quite tough to pull off and it involved lots of experimenting back and forth between Blender and Gimp that I use for image editing:

Foreground elements with no visible contact shadows

Shadow pass I used to create the inverted shadows

Rendered grim reaper element

In the final cover art image I added a black bar behind the grim reaper to fit the text inside. It was the same license plate font from dafont.com that I used in the car's plate. Overall this illustration was insanely fun to create and it shows that not every render has to be photorealistically created to have a strong impact.