Welcome to Nuclear Pixel!

Posted by Admiral on 2010-07-27 22:08:52

Hey everypeoples, I was quite a bit overdue for an update on my site, and thought I'd do something quick to change that. What in the world has kept me so busy that I can't even post to my own site, one of those things I promised myself I'd do? Well, part of that has been having to move in and out of a few places, start and finish a few projects with crazy deadlines at my day job(working 12 to 16 hour work days), and start packing all of my stuff up so I can move from Salt Lake City, Utah to Leeds, UK. WHAT? MOVING TO ENGLAND? Yeah, that's right. I haven't told some of you about this yet, but I'm moving to England for a year on September 20th, 2010. Also, I've been interviewed and have received a bit of publicity on City Weekly's website, and I have another small update on the Devil Guy toy project. More on everything after the video.

Yay! A video! FINALLY!

Shade timelapse modeling from Admiral Potato on Vimeo.

This is a timelapse screen capture of several sessions of Admiral Potato creating a 3D model of the spirit of "Shade" from SquareSoft's popular "Mana" series. This model was created in March of 2009.

This model can be viewed in your browser in 3D at:
http://nuclearpixel.com/models/view/2/

I'll explain why this video was so bloody delayed. Does anybody remember my epic tale of that Western Digital hard drive of mine that failed? Well, this is pretty much the end of that tale. I was able to save up $2000 USD and pay for some data recovery services, so I finally got the data back off of my drive that had inflicted physical damage to itself due to manufacturing defects. Even though the drive was perfectly within it's 1 year warranty, Western Digital did NOTHING to help with the cost of recovery. Western Digital can kiss my asterisk.

Anyway... this video was one of the bits of data that was recovered from the drive.

What's this about "TEN!!!"?

Well, there's not much to it. Remember that Devil Guy toy? Well, now there are 10 of them. Trent and I are working hard to find the time to work on designing the box that we'll be selling the toys in. I'm sure that we'll have them all boxed up and ready to sell by the up-coming local event named "Craft Lake City", but based on my current work load, I'm betting that we won't have them ready an instant before then.

In the following photos, you may notice that these models appear significantly more saturated than the first model I ordered. I'm not sure why that is, but in the image below with the trio of drunks, compare the model in the middle to the two around him. The one in the middle is a lot lighter. I'm not complaining at all, but I wonder what's up with that. Anyway, enjoy the photos.

Wait, did I say 10? Whoops, I was wrong about that. As of this morning, there are now 18 of the model. The strange thing is, I didn't order another batch of these guys. I'm not sure wether I've got a wicked-meticulous stalker and secret admirer, or if Shapeways just had some kind of a clerical error and sent me more of them out of the goodness of their own pocket-book. Either way, I'm happy to receive them.
Thank you, Good-Luck-Fairy-Claus!

Woah! Some publicity! Nice!

What? Publicity? Yeah, I know. I'm super excited about it. Gavin Sheehan, one of the staff bloggers for the local chapter of City Weekly, has interviewed me for his blog, "Gavin's Underground". It seriously took me every spare second I had over the last 2 weeks to analyze myself as introspectively as I needed to in order to completely and truthfully answer all of his questions at the level that I did, but I'm quite pleased with the results. I'll probably do a little bit of my own re-formatting of the text and re-post it here in the future, but for the moment, you can read it from the source. Thanks for the write-up, Gavin!(Remember, I still owe you lunch sometime next month.)

Work Deadlines and the Launch of Darth Validator 4: A New Way to Cope

Work deadlines have been kicking my asterisk lately. I've been working mostly 12 and 16 hour days at the office in order to meet some deadlines I've been working on. More details when I've launched them, but I'm super proud to announce that I'll be launching the new versions of the US and Japan TASCAM site within a month or so. Expect a full post on how much I think I rock when I finally make that monster live.

You might ask "What is Darth Validator 4, and why does it have such a silly title?". Well, Darth Validator is an object oriented PHP form creation and user input validation engine that I've written, and is in use on most of the websites I've written in the last 3 years. Why didn't I just use someone else's existing validation library? Because most of them that I came across had some pretty nasy memory usage and performance statistics, or they were so complicated to try and implement that it wasn't worth learning them. I also wanted to write one of my own so I could have a bit more control over how it behaved. Version 4 is a complete re-write of the whole thing from the ground up, including every feature I ever wished I'd had in any previous version. It will significantly reduce the time it takes me to build entire content administrative tools, and even take on most of the CRUD functionality that's so tedious to manually write most of the time.

Now, about the name. "Darth Validator 4: A New Way to Cope" It's name comes from... my imagination? Yeah, I dunno. All I can tell you is that the last version was named "Darth Validator 3: Revenge of the CodeSmith". Hehe. Get it? Revenge of the Sith? A New Hope? So punny.

What's up with all the moving?

Troy Flickinger intentionally made choices that cost his tenants painful amounts of effort, stress and finances because it would be "inconvenient" for Troy Flickinger to allow said tenants to pay him extra rent in order continue living at one of his properties for another 2 months before said tenant's flight to Leeds. Troy Flickinger is now on said tenant's "Enemy List".

The second move was into and out of the residence of a certain family member and will be discussed no further for the purposes of good taste.

Needless to say, all this moving happening in the middle of all of the other chaos that I've been through lately has caused nothing short of a near complete genocide of the strange race of creature known as "Admiral's free time". Hopefully, the few creatures left in the herd will be able to replenish their stock, but their outlook is rather bleak until after the move to Leeds has occurred.

Wait, what? Moving to England?

For a couple of reasons.

• My girlfriend is moving to Leeds for a year to finish up her Masters Degree in International Communications. I don't do long distance relationships, so it's go with, or break up. I kinda love her, so that's that.
• It'll make it really easy for me to attend this year's Blender Conference
• I've been told by several wise sources that opportunities like this only come along once in a person's life. I'm gonna take it rather than let it go.
• I've always wanted a little bit more of a global perspective on life. I'm gonna get it, alright.
• I have this crazy feeling that when I get out of my hometown for a while, I'll have this explosion of personal productivity that will really allow me to develop a lot of the... everything... that I've been wanting to for years.
• Travel and see Europe? Hell yes!
• Eat Bratwurst from the country of their invention? DOUBLE HELL YES!
• Eat Hamburgers in Hamburg? FOR IRONY!!!

Yup. So that's a quick status update. Quick? Yeah, quick my asterisk. It took me 3 hours to write this. Ah well. Let's hope I come across another 3 hours to write something more before I fly out.

Tags: 3d | blender | england | finally | grumble grumble | personal | publicity | timelapse | trent call | update | video | work

Posted by Admiral on 2010-05-26 01:17:49

On Friday May 20th, a 3D print of Trent's Devil Guy finally showed up at my work. I was so excited that my head almost exploded! Why was I so excited about this new model? Because this is the first model that I've had 3D printed using Shapeways' new "Full Color Sandstone" material. Though the design of the texmap on this version of the character was greyscale, I was quite impressed with the quality of the print. The surface of the material is a bit rough(and ridiculously easy to leave marks on), but the fact that I don't have to manually paint each physical model to get a texture on there totally makes this material totally worth using.

As I promised in a previous post, I have now made this model available for purchase at my Shapeways Store. All profits made from the sale of these are split 50 / 50 between Trent Call and I. If you purchase one of these models, please note that it was not designed to stand up on it's own, and will need to be glued to some kind of a base in order to stand. If you prefer to order the model directly from Trent or I though, you'll get the model on it's own stand, sealed, and inside of a limited edition box designed by both Trent and I, and manually screen printed by Trent.

It happened that this model showed up on the same day of an art show for some recent works by Trent Call, the original artist of this character's sketch. When I got off of work that day, I headed to Trent's show with a wicked cool surprise in hand. Earlier in the day, I had told Trent that I'd need him to bring some kind of a "2 inch disc" and some epoxy to his show. I'd had no idea that he'd actually bring a floppy disk, but hey, the black floppy he chose functioned perfectly as a base for the character.

Now of course, one of the first things I needed ad to my to-do list right after I received this cool new thing in the mail "IS DROP IT AND BREAK IT". So, like anyone who's trying to get a task completed sooner rather than later, I dropped it and broke it only 20 minutes after I glued it to its new base and started showing it around. At the moment I broke it, I was admittedly in a bit of shock from just having accomplished that goal so quickly, but I still found it rather interesting that when it broke, it did so almost exactly on the UV seams I had used for the 3D model's texture map.

Fortunately, the same glue I had used to attach the toy to its base worked wonders in putting Humpty back together again.

More than one of Mother Nature's elements would attack the model that evening though. While Gravity had already taken it's toll, the Rain from that night was next up for laying down the abuse. By the time I got home with the model in hand, I was starting to see strange little spots on the model where the surface seemed lighter than other areas. Since the disk the character was glued to seemed to have the same kinds of spots all over, I had guessed that the lighter spots on the model were something that had been deposited on ot it's surface via the rain. So what did I do? Stick the whole model under the faucet in my kitchen and try to "rinse the spots off". By the time I had let the model dry off after the rinse, it became obvious to me that the lighter spots on the model were not deposits, but areas of the model where the ink from the 3D printing process had been washed out or off.

Lessons learned from this experience? The next full color models I order from Shapeways will be dipped/coated in a sealant or finishing solution several times before I let them get anywhere near any other liquid. The photos below were taken after the 'rinse'.

Tags: 3d model | 3d print | blender | finally | trent call