This week I focused on several different aspects of my project. First, I concentrated on getting my 3D model of Bears Ears ready for print, doing a test print, and then doing the necessary boolean operations to extract the “Trump Speech” from the landscape. Second, I needed to sonify some landscape images to use in my animation. Third, it was important to rig an armature in a model of Trump and begin to build out the scene for my animation.
Research and Inspiration
This week was mainly filled with watching the tutorials I found last week and following along. I’ve listed the tutorials I found to be the most helpful below:
Blender Basics of Character Rigging
Blender Diffuse, Normal, Specular Maps
Armature Linked to Sound Input
I’d have to say that most of my inspiration this week also came from watching these tutorials. Again Blender is capable of so many different things I find myself almost dumbstruck. While searching for tutorials I did stumble back on the Agent 327 short and I found myself watching it over and over again to try and figure out how everything was animated. Obviously, I’m nowhere close to this sophisticated but I hope to be one day!
I also found these two videos on Blender animation fascinating:
Process and Progress
3D Printing
This week I ran a test print of my Bears Ears landscape and it’s a good thing I did it too because I had three failures. The first was something I should have known, the second and third were things I believe to have been outside my control. My first attempt at printing the large landscape model was done in ABS and I found out first hand the warping power of this material. Once I realized that a failure had happened I swapped out the filament for some HIPS in hopes that it wouldn’t have the same issue. I kept a closer eye on the beginning of this print and for some reason it was not adhearing to the buildplate that well so one of the corners started coming up resulting in another failure. With two failures on the Zortrax I decided to switch and go to the Ultimaker. As I was loading the filament and the machine started to spool up very quickly the filament just snapped, leaving a short piece in the tube for the Bowden extruder. After several unsuccesful attempts to remove that piece I loaded some more filament and it seemed like everything was working well at this point so I began my third print attempt. Halfway through the printing of the skirt and first layer the printer stopped laying filament so I stopped the print and had to try again. Now that the extra piece of filament was totally gone I unloaded and reloaded the filament, which had a nasty gear bite (that I cut off) on it for some reason. Once everything was reloaded I started my print for the fourth time and began to watch very carefully. After about 2 hours (with 12 hours left) of successful printing I left it to finish over night. Fingers crossed there is a sucessfully finished printed model on the printer when I get to school today!
3D Modeling + Animation
I tasked myself with rigging a 3D model of Trump with an armature and setting up a scene for my animation. I’m happy to say that I was able to complete these two steps without any hiccups. There were several tutorials that were helpful with the armature rigging and I even took it a step further and included some Inverse Kinematics. The model is now ready to be animated using audio that is baked to f-curves and some driver bones.
Once I was happy with my armature, I moved onto setting up the scene and adding in some materials. So far I have added materials with normal and specular maps for the wall and the floor; and I have added in several different vertex to the Trump model so that it can be multicolored.
Image Sonification
Lastly, I needed to sonify an image of the topographical data from Bears Ears National Monument to be used in my animation. I searched on the web for different ways to accomplish this and found that the best way in the case was to use a Max Patch made by Paul Fennell. I imported the image and it was creating sound, however I needed to play with a few of the settings before I was able to get a recording that sounded interesting and wasn’t clipping. I talked to one of my professors and we went through the patch so he was able to show me what was happening behind the scenes. Now that I have some extra knowledge of how it works, it’s possible that I might play with some of the BTS settings over the weekend to get something even better.
Reflection
This week I worked mostly on what I found to be rather time-intensive processes. My time in Blender took the longest; following along with tutorials to rig the armature, apply materials to different objects with the node editor, and baking sound to f-curves was a great experience because it showed me more and more of what is capable in this program (since I’ve only ever used it for 3D modeling/printing).
When I started with my test 3D print I crashed Z-Suite several times and I wasn’t really sure why; leading to some frustration. This obviously led me to ask questions of my peers and they all reassured me that the slicing process for larger objects can take up to a couple hours. This was something I had no reference for so I’m happy to know that my frustration was unfounded and now I understand what to expect for future large 3D prints.
The image sonification aspect of this project pushed me to use MAX again, which is software that, like Blender, presents so many possibilities. My initial use of these two programs has prompted me to set a schedule for the summer to practice Blender and MAX everyday. I’ve even seen some videos where people are using Blender and Max at the same time to do some real-time 3D animation which I find fascinating.