Bouncy Coffee Table RELOADED

It's COME BACK for another startlingly action-packed tour of duty, it's back from its months-long hiatus, and it's back more keenly socially perceptive than ever. . . IT'S THE PERPETUALLY LOPSIDED COFFEE TABLE that's not actually a coffee table but just a set millions of arbitrary magnetic orientations on my hard-disk representing bits of data representing the locations in three-space of each vertex in a mesh but which for your comprehension has now been rendered by a photonic simulator into a similarly digital image represented by a matrix of colored dots on the glowing rectangle through which you channel your consciousness all day--all just to trick you into seeing a picture of something that doesn't really exist!

Now that you've been reminded/enlightened of the unreality of your socio-cultural universe, break through that pale facsimile of the real by deconstructing it to the perpetual exclusion of the real, exposing the simulation as the construct it truly is! If you read all the way to the end of this intolerably inside joke, let me know by clicking "Interesting" below. . .

Wireframe:

CO2 Dragster Evoloution

A mind-bogglingly improbable infinite planar surface that reflects only blue and has only red specular highlights is the perfect backdrop for a chrome-painted balsa-block CO2 car and a highly refined, aerodynamically conscious CO2 dragster, a true speed-demon painted in metallic gold with a mysterious wireframe overlay of the same physically improbable material. Both come standard with physically impossible CO2 cartridges that roughly resemble miniaturized garbage cans used in ecologically RESPONSIBLE societies that put the R in Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. . . [SELF RIGHTEOUS NECK-TWITCH]

Bouncy Coffee Table

Behold, the most unconventional table shape possible!


First, the geometry of the glass surface was created by extruding a regular 100-gon upward (in the positive z direction) three times, scaling the utmost iteration down to .98 original size to achieve the angled bevel effect, and then scaling and rotating two pseudorandomly selected sets of diametrically opposed points with quadratically proportional fall-off to achieve meta-symmetrical curvature. I was then confronted a problem: the faces composing the top and bottom of the glass plate were non-manifold and overlapping because I had changed the geometry from a convex to a concave hull polytope (i.e. straight lines from points along the edges were designed to converge on a central point in the original geometry of the regular n-gon but ended up intersecting each other when the edges were no longer regular) and I had to retopify (a neologism for recalculating topography) from tris to quads.


Second, the base was created by type-casting a Bézier curve to the mesh object type and solidifying the mesh using multi-resolution editing and Catmull-Clark surface subdivision to achieve the desired shape.


Wireframe:

Why We Have Paper Weights

Just add wind, and all the term papers, business cards, parking passes, and other paper-y stuff you keep on your desk and dashboard look like the above image, which is a rendering all of the points of a 32x32 grid extruded and rotated about the z-axis 16 times, warped with quadratic fall-off with respect to scale locking the global x- and y-axes and then with linear fall-off rotated about the corners after all edges and faces have been removed from its geometry. It's that easy!

Waggle Dance

This honeycomb motif is getting ridiculous, but here's one that actually has to do with bees.

Honeybees perform a nifty figure-eight dance called a waggle dance to communicate the direction and distance to food.

TECHNICAL MINUTIA:
I first created a three-dimensional honeycomb sub-unit of two joined hexagons extruded and beveled (if you can't visualize that, they individually look like figure-eights or lemniscates). I then duplicated those figure-eight sub-units along the curves of three levels of mutually warping associative arrays to set a world record for the figure-eight with the most dimensions, a key breakthrough

I'm on the phone with Guinness now. . .

Hyper-Hive

To unnecessarily prolong the epic honeycomb motif, I give you yet another hyperdimensional array of awesomeness.

For technical specifications, see the web of life. Just add manic exploration of three-space, whatever that means. Remember, if at first you don't get it, try try modeling it yourself.

Web of Life

This begs to be your wallpaper.

Technical details
I created two 14x11 arrays of bi-hexagonal subunits and intertwined them on multiple dimensions by rotating each of the units relative to its own center point to interlock with surrounding sub-units of both arrays in both local and global x, y, and z axes. It is meant to connote a honeycomb pattern when viewed as a whole, DNA strands when following interaction patterns from top-left to bottom-center, and rays of sunlight radiating axially from the upper-right corner. I then rendered using ambient occlusion, low-intensity edge enhancement, and toon diffuse/specular shaders.

Uninterruptible

In this work (joke, actually) I tried to abstract the disorientingly chaotic and breakneck nature of urban sprawl and recode those characteristics into geometry and color. The intense, distracting colors represent the attention-grabbing designs and advertisements of competing corporate office buildings, which for all their differences have generally aligned motives (and thus have aligned base vectors).

Just kidding. Assign your own meaning.

Update - Golden Shell

Here is the latest and final version of my 3D model of Golden Shell. The topology around the lower pole is still not perfect, but further improvement will require an immense amount of effort for a negligible benefit. Enjoy.

Golden Shell - Wooden Sculpture

I recently stumbled across this 1994 sculpture by William Hunter in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, and I think it's intriguing.

Here is my simulated rendition of the piece:
[about one hour of modeling time; 2 minutes, 7 seconds to render on a netbook at 800x800]

Technical details!
I created a UV-sphere with 64 rings and 64 segments, rotated the upper pole about the z-axis with smooth proportional editing fall-off so the grooves are spiral-ish, selected every other longitudinal edge loop and scaled them along the x and y axes, chopped out an upper edge loop, skinned the resulting mesh, smoothed the internal surface, and rendered with a simple three-point lighting set-up and approximated ambient occlusion in the Blender internal renderer.

Right-leaning chair

This capstone project concludes my implausible chair study. It's meant to be more realistic than the beaver-tail chair, so it's not only physically stable but also politically charged. You'll find that most people don't use both armrests at the same time and that their choice of left or right armrests is correlated with their political polarization. A person drawn toward right-wing politics will usually favor the right wing of an armchair, and vice-versa. This first installment of your very own micropolitical furniture arena, the right-leaning chair, is also the perfect gift for your favorite fascist. Left-leaning chairs are scheduled for late 2009 roll-out, so your socialist and commie buddies won't feel left out. When dock-able centrist chairs are released in early 2010, you can battle your friends from all points on the political spectrum for arm-rest hegemony.

Don't look down!

I've done it again. It's too easy to get the right answer, boring to just win the game, mundane to make a stable chair. So, here's another chair of implausible balance. If you sit back in it, you'll hit your head on the floor. Lean your elbow on an armrest and you'll tumble off sideways. Enjoy.

Now for the excruciating technical details you've been waiting for. This chair started as a simple cube, but was extruded into roughly a seat, loop-cut half a dozen times, and subjected to three iterations of Catmull-Clark surface subdivision. Rendered in Yafaray with ambient occlusion for global illumination effects.

Eg-no-ra-moose

Cracker Barrel has what's called a "Jump all but one game." The back of the wood block has scoring guidelines:

"Leave only one--you're genius.

Leave two and you're purty smart.

Leave three and you're just plain dumb.

Leave four or mor'n you're just plain "EG-NO-RA-MOOSE."

Since it's boring and closed-ended to just leave one, I wonder what the theoretical maximum number of pegs left could be. Twelve is the most that can be left on the board at once (lined around the edges; impossible to achieve by "jumping" pegs), but nine pegs can be left during gameplay (see illustration).

Technically speaking, the block is a three-vertex cylinder with capped ends, beveled edges, and boolean subtracted cylinders to accommodate the pegs. The wood material was created using procedural, mutually warping texture channels using a Voronoi noise basis and a simple sinusoidal pattern at the top of the texture stack. The pegs were modeled through patient mesh-extrusion. The plastic material incorporates Fresnel-based mirroring to achieve a realistic reflection effect.

Spiffy Chair

I decided to switch gears to semi-plausible architectural visualization.

This particular chair was created by first thrice-extruding a cube, adding a bezier curve roughly the contour of the chair, and applying an array modifier to the cube to duplicate it along the curve. The result was then shrunk along the surface normals and subsurfaced using a Catmull-Clark algorithm. Fairly nifty.

Over-Microwaved Potato

Using the Blender's sculpt function is interesting. It allows you to turn a cube into a ridiculously contoured head. Add to that a normal-mapped potato-like texture, ray-transparent sunglasses, and an alpha-value-based Gaussian blur overlay composite node, and you get what looks like a potato that suddenly achieved sapience and a sensitivity to high-intensity UV-B radiation after being left in the microwave too long. 

Cityscape

This mesh was created in Blender 2.48 by starting with a 32 x 32 grid, applying a fractal subdivision, randomly selecting 10% of the faces and extruding to a random extent, and applying 6 different material shaders including various colors and degrees of Fresnel ray mirroring. The background is simply a noise texture between two different shades of blue.

Jedi Starfighter Wannabe

This is a follow-up to the video I posted which had two similar Star Wars spaceships spinning through space. This image has the rocket engine tails incorporated and chaotic motion blur/radiosity lighting, among other improvements.
As always, this image was made with Blender.

Improved Face

This is a continuation of an older project. The head has hair and skin, at least. Convincing eyes are still in the future, hence the sunglasses to cover up. Maybe nostrils and real ears are next. And hair that is deflected by the arms of the glasses. And subsurface scattering. And a mouth.
It's still a work in progress, but, as always, that work is done entirely in Blender on a computer running Ubuntu.

Star Wars Wannabe

This was inspired by the opening scene of Star Wars Episode 3. Except no one is shooting, there aren't 10,000 ships with animation, and the only two spaceships there just spin around once. As always, made only with Blender and Ubuntu.

Living Room in Yafray

I made a soft lighting effect by using a node set-up that blurred everything according to its brightness. So, the light bulb is just an emitter, not a lamp, just like the window. The couch was actually made in three separate parts: the body and two cushions. The hexagonal table has a glass surface. Also, the only things with color that are not in grayscale in the picture are books.
The radiosity baking took a long time, but it was worth it. Nothing like good, clean radiosity.

This image was created in Blender 2.46 and rendered in Yafray.