Blank Coins on a White Surface / Blender

So, I got fascinated on how to make a 3D-object look as much as a coin as possible. I decided the test coin (and thus the metal) should be a cent, copper-colored penny in euro and dollar-currency.

That said, I started Blender and started fiddling with the values. Soon enough, I had something like this on my screen:

And after rendering it:

It's still on it's way, but close enough for a couple of hours. Sure, they're not dirty, but they have some appeal and give the illusion of being coin-like.

I made the coin as a very small object, so just copying the values might not work. But here's a memo of what I thought:

1. The object itself was easy to do. I created a cylinder with enough vertices, the clicked on mirror-modifier, extruded the main-surface, the scaled it down slightly, extruded again and the just pushed those extruded polygons down. Thus making a surface resembling the outer rim of a coin.
2. The platform (a plane) for the object is slightly reflective, white and emitting slightly.
3. Turn on ambient occlusion. It makes everything look real. Lights are raytraced, noise is applied to shadows, etc.
   
4. When fixing the material, "copper-like", give it a bump-map (I used a variation of Voronoi). Don't forget to use ray-mirroring, but remember to "dampen" the mirror-effect with fresnel.

"You lost today kid, but it doesn't mean you have to like it."

A Pear Shaped Burlesque Girl

I did this with a Cintiq and SBP. Underneath girl textured, girl detail and girl progress:

The pose and position is pretty much free-flowed, so I had no original plan or design how I wanted the girl to be, it just came out of me little by little.

The Last One

So I made this graphic novel last summer. Spent a whole month (my vacation) making this. I showed it to a publisher, they were politely interested, but declined under the suspicion that this work would not be commercially viable and more so an "art book" rather than a comic. Which is kinda funny resolution for two reasons:

a. I work in advertising.

b. graphic novels are a high form of art to me. And an art book has a totally different definition to me, than whatever this is.

I took it as a compliment. But after this I decided to publish it in Lulu.com and I've decided to give you a choice, you can:

1. buy it for a dollar for it and support me.

2. download it for free.

Your choice. And I'll be drawing more of these, so beware! You can't discourage me from this, even if you tried. Here's a couple of frames, to catch your interest.

I wrote and thought about the story for two years and this one thing sort of launched it to a complete go. The whole thing was inspired by one character in Kimmo Lehtonen's LueMinut, a creative commons book itself as well.

In the recent years I've been inspired visually by Ashley Wood and Brian Wood . It might show in some style choices.

What pushed me to doing this? I felt like such a hack for never sort of finishing a comic story in my adulthood. I used to be so productive as a teenager. That and my deep feeling of escapism and final resolution during last christmas, spring and summer. All this changed after doing this, and I got a lot out. This is already more to me than any deal with any publisher could ever give me.

Maximum Halloween 3009 graphics

So I managed to pull off this brochure with Mikko Aromaa and Liisa Lehmusto. I also pushed and designed the visuals. The actual paper-mesh pig head was made by Jessica Koivistoinen. I just photographed and lit it. Then photoshopped it. Then designed it into a poster and brochure.

Otherwise I've been enjoying this: Various Artists – Babycakes 8-Bit. Reminds me of the days spent at Assembly.

Tokyo Gore Police Localization

So this was one of those projects that I've always wanted to try out. So I got the chance and I grabbed it. Now I can check one item off my designer bucket-list. Horror- / gore-movie dvd-covers.

About this Halloween

There's been a lot of things happening to me lately, which I can feel good about.

Yesterday I talked with a guard making his round at our office, he had noticed the Forum screen's Halloween animation and liked it. It's really cool to hear that type of stuff from a person who has no obligation to relate or to complement me about it.

On friday we had our fourth anniversary dinner with my wife and I from there continued to go see a movie at the Night Visions Maximum Halloween, to which I've designed the brochures and posters. But it wasn't only a movie I went to see, it also had a live show. It was the Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Slide Show , which was him, live. After that we saw his movie It is Fine. Everything is Fine! ... I loved all of it. I felt inspired and relaxed.

Now that alone would've been really cool, but it gets better. I also got to exchange a few words with him after his Q&A-moment and got his book with his autograph on it through a serendipitous "incident". Rare treat with a rare experience combined. You know, it's not that often I happen to get to talk to a guy, who delivered an emotionally fantastic performance an a movie I idolized as a kid.

He asked how had I heard about his Show and I said I was the designer of Maximum Halloween's brochures and posters. Which has as such nothing to do with his books or his show.

Happy Halloween

I've been working on a central Helsinki screen-concept for one of our new client, the shopping center Forum. It's one of our "most innovative" cases in the sense that we've managed to get two girls living in the shopping mall (from fall till Christmas) and transform the mall's webpage into their blog.

This video shows how we deliver the animations / videos for the screen. The animation itself is Forum's  Halloween greetings. I requested a permission to do something for the screen for Halloween (something more special than the bats and ghouls I had animated, which were in-between animations for highlighted, specialized stores), after which I designed and animated the "loop" with AE and Blender and I'm updating the file manually on the top floor of Forum.

Al Lowe / Game Designs

This weekend I found Al Lowe's game design documents from his "humor-site". Read through Leisure Suit Larry 6-game design while playing this way too much.

The best thing about Al Lowe's design process (in my opinion) was what he comments on his web page:

"You won't find any dialogue here. I always wait to write that directly in Sierra's 'Message Editor', a utility program that allowed me to edit game text, conversations, descriptions, etc. right up until the moment someone played the game. It was a wonderfully interactive way to create dialogue."

No wonder the dialogue was so good. Organic / intuitive based methods rule (when the have a strong structure as a backbone – very much like in this case).

Maybe I'm ready to make another fun flash-game. Also this was interesting.

Don't Have a Cow, Man

Turns out that they liked my stuff in the Middle East. Also the brochure print came out fine for the horror- / fantasy- / scifi-film festival. I'll post some images later (today). Meanwhile, here's an unfinished sketch for a client :



The final outcome of the sketch went through already, but due to the nature of my work, I cannot post it here. Yet.

Work / Sketching

Been busy lately and been mainly working on some new product stuff onto everyday consumer products (illustrations mainly) that I can't yet publish here. That's mainly – other things include localized DVD-cover for a japanese gore-movie, horror/fantasy film festival brochure design, identity work for an Arab Emirate based company, campaign page for a toilet paper company and seminar identity work.

Here's something else though for one of the other clients I've been designing stuff (the original characters, corporate image, etc.) :

Silly-cone Valley and YouTwitFace

"It's ok to suck", that's what I got from today's social web workshop / seminar. I'm going to post my notes as slides as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I put my creative commons graphic novel to be sold at Lulu.com ...

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-last-one/7725447

Enjoy. I'll post more about this when I have time.

-Teemu

Map-project / Flash

As you might have read from the previous post, I've been busy lately as a freelance flash developer (because of my stupidity I spent correcting a year old map-system I had done originally). I'll open this up a bit more later, but to give you a hint why it's slightly hard to do is this: all things are loaded dynamically – points coordinates, information with links, colors, 4 different resolution-layers of map-pieces. Smooth zoom-in and out, mouse-drag the whole shebang I suppose. There's still a couple of things I'd like to do to it, but this is enough for now.

Below are some shots of the whole thing. It looks like a mess, because it's my developing XML. At least it was a good exercise for the brain.

Oh yeah, and it's Actionscript 2.0 ...

Hey Kids! Remember to Take Backups!

The picture above is not a backup. It's what happens when you don't take backups.

I had to write 20% of code again for a freelance client (naturally the most difficult non-grunt part) of a flash-based map-software and slept 2 hours last night. Gridded, zoomable, "multi-resolution-map-software" with multiple information XML's is not the most fun thing to re-write.

So here's a reminder of what might happen.

Weekend Sketching

Blender Game Engine

I was procrastinating on checking this out because I first wanted to learn how to animate and model with Blender. Now that that's well on it's way, I guess I felt comfortable enough to check it out. To begin with I started by checking out this tutorial / pdf.

So it turned out to be quite easy. It all seems to rotate somewhat around three things: Sensors, Controllers and Actuators. I made a simple control test for a strangely modified cube and added an UV-sphere to be a game element. After pressing P, it all seems to be working just fine. I also tested out saving the "game" as runtime. It exported a 29.9 Mb run-time file.

Below I made a memo of how the keyboard controls were made after which how the collision object is defined through property (which I) named "CollisionObject". Naturally it had to be added to the sphere also and not just named in the Logic-view.

Hand Rig / Blender

I am continuing with the alien arm, since I needed to pose it well to hold another object (the product). I used the "bone heat" to create vertex groups and it seems to be the easy way to go on this particular project.

Here's Johnny!

After watching The Shining and drawing in the middle of the night, I googled "Here's Johnny" appropriately during the scene where Jack Nicholson says "Here's Johnny" and found this interesting thing:

http://www.heresjohnnyfilm.com/

I mean, who doesn't like ultra-violence? Especially when there's an unwritten message behind it all portrayed in the linked documentary. Here's more about John Deadstock. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (in 2000).

A Man

Web Layout / Concept

Blender Keyboard Shortcuts

I am now getting myself familiar with simple mesh-stuff and modeling keyboard shortcuts, but I always forget something like how to link the armature and mesh. How irritating, especially when you know you've done it several times and you just can't get your head to work out of modeling mode.

So I googled with words "linking mesh to armature keyboard shortcut" and found this nicety:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8288924/Blender-Keyboard-Shortcuts

It was useful, though slightly cryptic ... The correct answer for "linking" the mesh was CTRL + P, which naturally is instead of "linking", "parenting". Well done. Now that I've publicly stated my horrible state of remembering terms, maybe I'll remember it myself ...

How selfish of me.

To compensate, here's an image of the progress:

As you can see, the mesh is mirrored and having the full armature done has no effect on the other side.

Wii Sports Boxing Skills

I think I need a new game for Wii. Or then a PS3. It can't go on like this. I broke the skill-chart.

Raytrace testing / Blender

I found this nice tutorial on Blender and ray-casting.

Then I made my own test.

Raytrace Test / Blender

An Alien / Blender

So, I have this assignment at work and I'm working on a character for a certain product.

I've done so far 2 other characters (in 2D), but this one is pending on customer approval. I'll be posting pictures of the print later on, once they hit the stores.

Anyhoo, this time I decided to sketch out a character and 3D-model it. I used subsurface scattering for the skin and asteroid. Anyways, this still needs some fixes on the character and the pose is too static right now. Below are sceenshots from Blender of the character and the render output with some color definition and adjustments done in Photoshop.

Apple!

Hair Test / Blender

I sculpted the face quickly (starting from a UV-sphere and mirror brush, then moving on to splitting the head in half and applying mirror-modifier, after which I sculpted a little bit more) and then applied particle hair.

Internet – It's not a laughing matter

In the Beginning, There Was the Cube

More blending. Yes, again. This time I managed to rig one of those "I did this character in about 15 minutes"-characters. And I made a simple and still-in-progress walk cycle.

I started modeling by extruding the mesh cube. Turning on the mirroring and turning clipping on, seemed to make the process even faster (o'really). The "drawings" you see on the character are the result of two colors, my mac's trackpad and the laziness of me not taking the UV-map out and editing it in a proper software. I used Blender´s own UV-drawing option. No, not on the character, but on the unwrapped UV-map in that particular view. Select and press CTRL+E marks the seams, and oh boy do you need the seams to open-up your character properly.

The animation cycle has it's problems. Not enough easing in some cases, no tilting of the hip and limited bounciness. Sad. But it does it's job as a demo that I've done some stuff like this before. For a game. Indie game.

The character itself is a clumsy mix of an crocodile and / or a boy with a too large cap and a tail.

TV-film "storyboard"

This is how we do it in my corner. If somebody was wondering or ass-king.

Drawn on a piece of paper while discussing the methods of animating a tail to a film with a colleague. The Ass King has nothing to do with it as such – it's just a weird mnemonic for me to remember that I had something to do.

Jumpman / Blender

Yes, again this work is inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto's Jumpman. And this still needs some hours of concentrating (like 90% of stuff in this blog) at least on the rig. I suppose I'll animate it, once I get the armature properly working.

I wanted to keep the arms flat and the polygon level low. Why? I don't have the slightest idea. Must be some sort of perversion.

Anyhoo, it was good practice and good fun so far. Except for the part that sucked ass.

Elisa Viihde Demo

I animated, designed and storyboarded this short demo for Elisa's (Telecom operator in Finland, large one, as if that matters ;-) website. It was fun. Major fun. If you're interested, you'll find the other people involved at the vimeo-site.

(L)oops

These loops are something I have done during a work day, while taking a break or waiting for customer response. If you have to find a function to them, they might as well be called warm-ups.

I guess the interesting part is that I don't plan these ahead (I do have an idea where to start, but what ever happens during the clip is a mystery to me). I just start drawing and finish it cell-by-cell, animated by hand and then composited.

And even though they might just be "warm-ups" and not planned they still probably capture something that's been going on in my head for a while, finally letting it all out. At least they please me since I sometimes get stuck watching them over and over again.

Loop 2:



Loop 1:

Triple Mario Fukup

Decided to model / render a fukup of Super Mario. Worked out ... well ... can you say it worked out, if it's supposed to be fucked up?

Another Render / Blender

Better

Here's something to make me feel better about it for the rest of the day.


Or night. Anyways, enough for today.

Hair Continued, Blender

Got the eyelashes in place. And styled the hair a little bit. And the eyebrows.

Not that they're done or anything. And I have to do something about the lips ...

Face + Hair, Blender

So since I had a face and some hair, I thought it'd be nice to combine these two. It took me a while, but I got the hang of it ... weight paint the model, assign particles to that group, then start free editing it after the overall particle values are correct. And with the help of this page I managed to make the hair look more hair-like. And after I figured out this button:


I was much happier, but not as happy when I found this button:


The end result is "ok", but there's obviously still a lot of work to be done. Maybe I should actually design a project which utilizes these skills, instead of aimlessly learning new stuff. Maybe I'll do that next.

Hairyness + Blender

Since I have the improvised face close to done, I needed to learn the basics of hair in Blender. Apparently it is easy too. After some combing, adding, puffing, smoothing and cutting I ended up with a nice mess of a hair.

Below is a mess I made in the form of a cube.

Face Continued

So I continued the face and started mirroring it. Naturally I did this after multiressing it, so I ended up stitching the whole thing from the middle. I decided to not to mind the polygon count and just play with the face and make it look like it's sculpted.


Now I need to add hair and do some fixes, I've listed below.