Tech Loon

After quite some time and a few readers on my original specular baking tutorial of sorts, I decided I need to update the method. I created a setup a while ago while working on some more advanced texturing that combines the methods I used before. [...]

Rapid prototyping.  ”What?”  Sounds boring, indeed it does – but once we get past the technical details and difficult establishment of service, what we have is a geektastic pastime.
What is it?  Basically, 3-D printing.  That is to say, there are a few methods which create objects layer by layer out of various materials.  Wikipedia explains [...]

This may seem out of character, so I will preface with this: I loathe incompetence only when claims are made to the contrary.  It is natural that some people are terrible at some things, most are terrible at most things – but when they are paid or claim to do the very things they can’t [...]

75% off on Steam was tempting, so I grabbed the demo for Dawn of War – Soulstorm to help me make the decision.  I played for about two hours and gave it an honest attempt.  I will admit I have never been very into the Warhammer franchise, and know relatively little outside general concepts.  Forming [...]

I turned 27 this year: nothing monumental.  I have realized, though, that some things have lost their flavor.  No, I’m not talking about food.  I’m talking about games.
The last RPG to truly pull me in was Neverwinter Nights yes, the first one.  EVE-Online doesn’t count because it sucked my life away and I had to quit [...]

It’s BUGM!  For lack of a better name.  First, some images:
This is my “Ultimate Gaming Machine” or the fulfillment of years of wishing I could just get the best of everything.  This box has an EVGA X58 SLI motherboard, the Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 965, 3x XFX GTX280 XXX Edition, 12GB (6×2GB) G.Skill DDR3 [...]

I had lived with the problem long enough: every time I would get home and plug in the external 30 inch, my desktop resolution reset to 800×600.  This applied to the notebook screen (native 1920×1200) and the 30 inch both.  SLI didn’t affect anything, both screens would reset if I had it off; the active [...]

Here I am again baking textures.  This time I’m baking for sculpties: a little more complex.  For this I have made a chair.  I started with a model downloaded here.  This is a shot of the heavily modified mesh in Blender:
I added detail, subsurfacing, etc. to make it look better.
 
Now, I got this model but [...]

Today I decided to try an extreme take on an old trick in Second Life: texture baking.  I have always liked the way a pre-rendered (in a way) scene looks as opposed to the SL engine, for shadows, ambient occlusion, etc.  Blender makes this easy with “texture baking”.  As long as the UV map will [...]

As part of a school assignment, I was required to create a “logo” or graphic for an inventory management program.  I played in Blender for a few hours on Friday and came up with this:

I quite like the results and will be using Blender more often for things outside my normal Sculptie map exports.
I modeled [...]