Minimate Labs

Site 23-Baker: Survey

April 24, 2011

I'm starting off a new series of renderings titled "Site 23-Baker". I've been working on this on-and-off for the last several months and I figured it's about time I start posting about them.

Click on the image for a larger version. I'm not going to spend a lot of time rambling about each image, hopefully they'll speak for themselves.

Android Flyby

February 18, 2011

An independent, solitary robotic mascot ventures through a desolate landscape. We do not know where he is going. We do not know where he has been. But his encounter with a towering artifact expands our knowledge of himm... and ourselves.

Eh, whatever. Click through to see another Blender animation that got out of hand.
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Blue Experiment 1

December 7, 2010

I'm working on a somewhat large Minimate rendering project and I've hit a bit of a initiative block. As my mind wanders, I start to play around with various material settings to see what happens. Sometimes they look pretty cool.

It's nothing high-concept or earth-shattering, but I like it. Click for a 1600x1080 version.

I hope to start adding these 'on the workbench' type posts on a more regular basis. Though I need to come up with a better way to describe them, preferably one that I didn't steal from Boyd.

ADDED:I think "Lab Table" is a good replacement.

Tronified Spidey Render

November 14, 2010

When Disney bought Marvel it seemed inevitable that worlds would collide. With the upcoming Tron sequel, Marvel is producing a series of variant covers with various heavies reimagined in a Tron world.

With my love of all glowy things, I decided a Minimate version of Spider-Man was in order.
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Cyclops Wallpapers and Animation

October 12, 2010

Something told me it was time to get back into Minimate rendering, and I'm glad I did. I love working with Blender. Before starting Cyclops here, I had only modeled the basic Minimate. It was time to add a few accoutrements. Thankfully the 'mechanical' shapes were fairly easy to make.

It was the organics that were hard.
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Metal Minimate

October 3, 2010

What do you get when you combine a 3D model with an emerging technology?

In this case, something with some heft to it.
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Robot Assembly Render

June 13, 2010

After spending the last couple of weeks on this Minimate animation I've realized that it might be a bit more than I can handle right now. There's probably a good four minutes of storyboards all layed out. The scene and characters are all modeled and textured. Unfortunately, I'm running into problems with the animation process. Things that should be simple and straight-forward aren't working properly for me.

It's not the end of the world, I think I just made some mistakes early in the process that weren't apparent until now. The bad part is that I don't know what those were. So instead of starting over and repeating my mistakes, I'm going to scale back and accomplish smaller projects like a creating a Wolverine with functioning claws, Cyclops with an optic blast, Banner transforming into Hulk. Try to learn something from each little success.

I'm not scrapping the large animation project either. I'm just postponing it until I have more experience. Here's one of the many test renders I made for it.

Click the image for a 1080x720 version.

Spider-Man Texture

June 3, 2010

Not only does the Blender community want to share their work, they want to share their knowledge. Many people take it upon themselves to produce tutorials (text-based and video) to demonstrate how to accomplish a particular task. I used a couple of these to figure out the best way to 'unwrap' and flatten a model so I could apply the Spider-Man texture. After unwrapping, I copied the layout and sent it to GIMP (an open source image editing program) where I re-created the familiar red and blue webbed suit.

It's not an easy process, but I'm sure as I create more textures I'll get better at it.

Materials Testing

May 31, 2010

One of the great things about the Blender community is they like to give stuff away. Blender is an Open Source program which means the code and application itself is freely available. This engenders similar acts from Blender users. Many people will make their models, animation rigs, textures, etc. available to anyone. I spent some time looking for a good plastic material and came upon the Blender Open Material Repository. I didn't find a plastic that I liked, but some of the materials made for interesting Minimates.

Gold

Hot Metal

Ice

Soap Film

Mixed Metals

Honey

Red Tinted Glass

You'll notice in some of the transparent images that I didn't model the interior of the torso block. It's on the task list.