Courne Supremacy

I’m by no means any expert at photography, but it’s fun to play with. Shooting small things and toys are cool.

I showed you my lego photo box before. This time I borrowed a macro-lens from a friend. It’s a Minolta lens which fits into the Sony A-mount. It does 28-85mm, but I only cared about the macro mode. There wasn’t any autofocus with the macro, so I just had to focus it myself, but I think the photos came out pretty well. Here’s a look at my setup — it’s the same as last time — a lego frame and then white paper for the sides and backdrop. Something that’s not pictured here is an aluminium foil reflector I created out of a piece of comic book bristol board and crumpled foil. Since I’m incredibly lazy the lamp just shines a top down light onto the toy. Alright it’s not really due to laziness. I played around with the light’s orientation and I didn’t like any of the cast shadows. I wanted the shadows to be right under the toy and if I did that I needed to bounce light back up to illuminate the toy further or there would be some hard shadows.  There’s still a lot of post-processing done on my computer to adjust the exposure and the black levels of each photo. I just moved the sliders until I felt happy with it and wham, bam, done.

I wanted it to look overexposed and very white and bright. I like that look a lot.

I’m exercising my Otakuness these days. I’ve got a bunch of new figures I want to purchase and adorn my house with — all of them are K-ON! figures. Alter released these figures of Mio, Yui, and Azusa, and I’ve ordered them. No idea when they’ll come in though since the dates are all further out, but I figure it’ll be like a nice surprise later on.

The setup in picture form:

First up Haruhi. The first image is ‘shopped from three images I took. I’m no expert in photo-manipulation, which puts me on par with everyone else who sucks at photoshopping images.

I recently got the Galaxy Express 999 figures. So here they are again. I tried some different shooting techniques with these figures. The upshot of Maetel and Tetsuro I achieved by laying them down on the “infinite white paper. I then held Tetsuro about level with her and as straight as I could and shot them together. I played with DOF with some of these photos as well and since GE999 is generally pretty (melo)dramatic, I thought it would add a nice touch to the toys.

Symbols for Ladies Chinenesis, Gigantea, and Foetida (just a warning, this image is fakkin’ huge):

No set is complete without Albino Grimby sitting on top of Kasumi.

That concludes my anime toy shoot for the time being.

Tags: albino grimby, Galaxy Express 999, Haruhi Suzumiya, kasumi, maria-sama ga miteru, Photography, sony a200, white box

My latest work-in-progress. A “bunny rabbit” character that I created with my brother named Albino Grimby — hence my Interwebs nickname. His Interwebs nickname is Grimby Slayer. Here’s what Albino actually is:

A small stuffed animal. He might look cute, but we all know the truth. He’s evil to the core although all he ever wants (porportly) is to bite your face off with his non-existent mouth or get some candy and let it absorb into his body as if he were the blob. My brother and I knew of his fowlness and thusly, his full name is “Albino the Brain Sucking Grimby.” He doesn’t actually do that or anything else. Now here he is in 3D with fur and without fur:

The fur one, when you look at it closely, isn’t there yet, but I didn’t spend much time on getting the fur to move correctly. The model itself is a work-in-progress. I still need to add details to his paws (hands) and figure out how I want to texture map him or just use base colors and furry-ize him to death. The fur version of Albino has 100,000 fur particle covering his body. I would need to use forcefields and whatnot to get them to stand in the correct way. Might be do-able. I spent all day yesterday familiarizing myself with Blender’s particle system — mainly for doing hair, but that’s really tough. I tried to add hair to my head model (see previous post for bad renders the head model). I managed to get the hair from looking really, really bad to looking like barbie doll hair or a washed-up punk rocker chick after a night of binge drinking and cocaine. I need to improve my technique or there are tools that Blender needs in the barber shop area. I saw that they’re working on some, and I look forward with great anticipation at what the next release of Blender will harbor for hairstyling.

My goal for Albino Grimby is to make him a fully articulate 3D character. So he’ll be modeled, textured, and rigged. Then I can do some animations with him. Like this one:

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/albinofly.avi

Notice, though, that the Albino in the animation has a big ole mouth. That would actually be Albino’s japanese brother, “Mangabino.” From there, I’d even like to experiment with him in Blender’s game engine or in DirectX. That might be fun to have a fully articulate character. It would also be great to test him with my OBJ code to ensure that it still works and raytrace him via my homebrewed raytracer.

Where is all of this 3D going? I’m definitely not interested in getting a job as a 3D modeler. I’m quite happy as a software engineering. I’m content with this being a hobby. I’m also happy to support Blender and freeware. If freeware is this damn good, then I say, let’s keep going in that direction.

I’d like to see my characters live in 3D most of all. Especially this one, which is the ultimate goal. (BTW, potentially NSFW.)

Tags: 3D Modeling, albino grimby, blender