McAlister Matters

We've been doing more Blender lately and have completed some more projects. Our project goal was to model an existing object with exactness and precision. Here are the results. Sarah modeled some of Kahlan's mega-blocks in the form of a dog. It came out really cool looking! I made a replica of our record player. I had to simplify it a bit. I created a short animation too just for fun :)

Sarah and I have been having more fun with Blender. For our latest projects we did some architectural modeling. We made short videos to show off our work with music! Sarah created a sweet castle tower with a spiral staircase. Check it out!  I modeled the naive of a cathedral. I took advantage of a lot of symmetry. I think it's a good start.

Sarah and I completed our 3rd solo projects for our Blender course. We had to made an exploded view animation of some object made of several parts. Sarah chose to model a roller blade. I recreated my childhood skateboard. As always it was a lot of fun and I think we both learned a lot.

Tinker Bell Kahlan's Tinker Bell costume. Sarah and I carved 3D pumpkins last night using Blender. It was not as messy as carving real pumpkins but still lots of fun! The scary results:

Sarah and I have completed our second projects for our Blender online course. We had fun making our own robots! Here are some resulting images: Here is Sarah's awesome 'companion' robot: Here is my 'farmer' robot:

Sarah and I have been taking a free online course to learn how to make 3D art in Blender . It's been a LOT of fun. Here are the finished products of our first solo projects. We were supposed to make some kind of jewelry. Sarah made this cool ring. I made this celtic crown.

For my latest project at school I've been able to play with motion capture ('mocap') data. Motion capture is a popular technique for character animation where live actors perform the actions while wearing special suits and markers. The data is recorded and stored in the form of joint angles and positions. I worked with existing motion capture data made available by CMU Graphics Lab . Basically I made a motion capture data player.  Ultimately I hope to play around a little more with motion retargeting and motion graphs but for now this was good for a two week project.  I'm pretty pleased with the visual results and performance.  It's all C++/OpenGL code.  Here are some video results.