The February Free•For•All

[Gare]

So what does February mean?

Yeah, two more months of snow in the North East, but it's also Valentine's Day!

The competition this month is to design a Valentine's Day card for someone or something you love: a fellow homo sapien, your pet goldfish, your piano...as John Lennon told Brian Epstein once, "It's not important who you love, but just that you love."

So show a little love and get to designing and posting. I'll go first with a lawyer-approved, safety first card example.

The contest closes February 13th, so get your wings on.



My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

Here's a bigger version...

http://homepage.mac.com/wellesgoodrich/valentine07-1024.jpg

[Gare]

Bee-you-tee-ful, Welles! 

Very nice flowers! 

-g-

[Welles]

Hey Gare,

The flowers and fish were freeware models found here... http://toucan.web.infoseek.co.jp/3DCG/3ds/FlowerModelsE.html

I took the time to turn them into .vob files for Vue5/6 if anybody wants them.

[Gare]

That's a very gracious and generous offer, Welles. 

Toru Miyazawa has got some nice models up there. As 3D Studio binary files, you might run into some creases in the models; folks frequently post low-res models to keep the file size down (and then it's sort of up to you yourself to increase the resolution and decrese the vertices angles); because they didn't post the project files, there's no real practical way to fine-tune the edges, but I'll volunteeer if there's any interest, to massage any of the files.

Incidentally, if you're not a modeling weenie but would like to try the sport out (and you have Windows), trueSpace 3 is free and it will import 3DS files, albeit the image maps come in a tad funky. I've got some tutorials on trueSpace posted. I'm sure there's a lot of free or inexpensive rendering apps out ther for both Mac and Win; Vue does the job quite nicely.

Here's a close-up of the roses file. I put the model in a hyperNURBs husk to smooth out the geometry. The image map is the original and even at 256 x 256 pixels, I think it reads okay with some anti-aliasing.

Get them hearts in folks!

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

The lighting on those roses looks great!

[Gare]

Thanks, Welles...I've been concentrating a lot on cameras, materials, but lighting can make or break a synthetic scene. Roses have a vert diffuse surface in the Real World (the last time I was there), so I avoided any specular property one could give the image map. Then I used a virtual "lightbox" for the primary light source instead of harher "directional" lighting. I also used shadow mapping at high res instead of ray-traced shadows, whose sharp edges tend to spoil the softness of such a subject.

I already had the lighting set up from a render I did yesterday of this kid's water pistol.

Guns and roses,

Gare

[Raven Song]

Great images! 
...something for my Sweetie...

[areno]

Well seeing that today is V-day here t'is... been doing a bit of modeling and working on my textures skills , anyway the bear's a poser figure imported into C4D where I modeled the token. Wish I could've spent more time on the rest of the card tho...

[Gare]

Nice one, areno!

Okay, here's a valentine for those who are into literal interpretations...


-g-

[Welles]

Is that a Jarvik 2000? (Now there's a fairly obscure reference...) 

[Gare]

Hey, Welles,

Not obscure at all. In fact, transplants are so common, the Jarvik 2000 is now available from Ronco for 1995.

Okay, to get more with the spirit, here's a Xara illustration I did for the occasion.

My Best,

Gare

[Gare]

I apologize for the tardiness in the judging for February...we were short-staffed, everyone phoned in with heart-sickness.

For Best Design and Most Thought: Areno, you take the quiver! Wings off to you!

For Second-Best Design and Most Valuable Link: Welles, thank you for your participation. The flowers are wonderful, a terrific addition to anyone's modeling lard.

For most Personal Valentine in a Public Place: Crow, beautiful word, as always!

areno, make a choked-up and tearful acceptance speech of 45 words or less, won't you?

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

Yea! That was a sweet valentine! Nice work, Areno!