Did the Germans Use UFO Technology?

Back in July of 2010 I put this model in mothballs. I have some ideas on what to use it for now.

The Nazi Engine That Could

I'm blowing the dust off this Nazi armored train NURBS model that I want to add to the scene and animate as well. I've emailed the people that came up with the concept years ago and finally got an email back saying as long as I'm not selling it or anything, blah blah. So I will finish this up (hopefully tonight). It's only in the scene for maybe two seconds or three as it zooms in front of the camera.

I'm changing the path of the dirigible slightly for another animation test and I'll turn on lens flares since I forgot to do that the last time.

Building a TV Set

Hak mentioned my missing TV frame. Here is a quick one I modeled just now. I'll render it in modo with different lighting on it for the different brightness used for each clip. Who knows, maybe it will work?

This is modeled from my 1980 13" Toshiba TV (minus the rabbit ears and the UHF ring, since I have something fairly cool and more modern now called coxial cable for my TV channel reception).I've streched the width of the frame though because it needs to be 640 x 480. My TV has more of a square shape to it. Note that TV shows don't even fill the entire screen on my TV anymore. I rarely watch any TV, so this device is more of a museum piece.

A 2-Second Wipe Demonstration (with commentary)

Just seeing if I could break Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate. I'm sure I broke a few Hollywood laws in the process.

Deshaker is my New Best Friend

Deshaker 3.0 is amazing. It even works on CG footage. Why CG footage would have camera shaking in it in the first place is beyond me. Huh, what was that? My last render had what in it?I attempted to remedy that problem here.

Robot Explorer of Alien World

I'm getting better at using Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate. Or not.

720 x 480. But can be viewed at 1280 x 720 HD (that's crazy talk!).

CG rendered in Vue 10 Infinite. Lots of postwork. Lot's of free time.

Beavis, I Have Seen the HD Mountains

I've spent the last week taking a crash course in digital video editing and converting. Everything I thought I knew before the training was wrong. I had more questions after finding some of the answers. A lot of trial and error was involved. A lot of Bing searches. A lot of forum reading. A lot of "free" video conversion malware to watch out for.

And a lot of taking notes, so I have a reference to go back to and to add more solutions to that I find from experimenting.

This all started when my dad asked me how to make a DVD using his Mac. I had no idea, but told him to look for something called iMovie or something. Well, he found iDVD in one of his folders. I have no idea how to use a Mac, so he did all the button pressing. I just made suggestions of how I would make a DVD if I was using any generic computer.

Five minutes later, he was watching his burned DVD on his TV.

So then I had the video bug. Only I didn't have any videos to start with. The differences between NTSC and HD and MP2 and MP4 and DivX and DV-AVI and WMV and... And getting the aspects correct and the FPS and the bit-rate and the audio Hz and the audio sync and the progressive/interlaced setting...

It's amazing any videos get made right. But 99% of HDTV viewers at home just press the zoom or stretch buttons anyway when they watch movies. They don't care about people with fat heads on their screen, or tops of heads being cut off. All that money they spend on HD equipment and they just want to watch their DVDs.

Lost Survey Ship Footage

A quick preview quality (some OpenGL quality, too) animation from Vue 10 Infinite. Trying out the cinerama format. A widescreen version can be watched on YouTube.

Yes, I know. It's not quite as exciting as an Underground Racing video.


ADDED:

I tried recording as MP2 instead of with MP4 for this version. It's 720 x 480 instead of the original 720 x 400. So the text came out better at least.

Alien World Outpost Concept

I'm a few hours into the beginning concept for this outpost on an alien world scene I plan to create in Vue. The structure was modeled in Hexagon and then UV mapped and painted in 3D-Coat. A few gravel and concrete textures were mixed with some brown color added for the "base" paint. Then a dark color was painted (by hand) in the concave areas. And a light color (with spec turned on) was painted on the outer edges.

I forgot that I probably could have done this on the fly with 3D-Coat's new concave painting. But I wanted to see if I could do a more sloppy job of applying natural wear to the walls. This is a screenshot taken from 3D-Coat. This will also be the first time I attempt a Vue animation that's longer than five seconds. Ha ha.

There may be some match-moving involved if I have the right footage of desert landscape.

Focused Vue

Used a ray-traced blur in Vue to allow for the eye to be in focus. Lens flare done in Vue.