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.

I like to use the descriptor 'experiment' for a lot of the things I do. It really helps to displace responsibility for my actions. You can get away with a lot of crappy stuff if you call it an 'experiment'. You were just messing around, seeing what you could do. You weren't trying to make anything good. If it's good, cool. If it sucks, it doesn't matter.

The perfect cop-out.



I learned some valuable lessons from this initial stop-motion project:

• It's very important to lock down your camera's tripod.
• It's very important to lock down your subject matter.
• Pet's should be isolated for the duration of the shoot.
• Crouching is not comfortable for long periods of time.
• Make sure subject is in focus.
• Pants are optional.
• Dancing is forbidden!

I though I had everything fairly secure and there wasn't going to be much jitter. After assembling the frames, I found I was obviously quite wrong. I thought about reshooting or modifiying the frames, but after working with it I realized the subject matter didn't warrant the extra effort. It just wasn't interesting enough to devote more time to. There was no vision.

I intend the next one to be much more interesting.

This is going to be another one of those light-on-text-heavy-on-pics type posts. There's really not too much to say about taking photos of Minimates, having them printed at various sizes, surrounding them with frames and suspending them on a wall. Which is exactly what I did.
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If it isn't already totally obvious, I like things that glow. From LEDs to bio-luminescent sea-life, if it emits light it is good. I also like things that are transparent. Actually translucent is a better word. If light can pass through it, it is good. I decided to combine those two fascinations into this Pantone project. There was a set of translucent Kubricks that sold for silly money. I couldn't warrant spending huge funds on a Kubrick item, I decided to spend funds on making a Minimate version. Then I made it glow.
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All the world's best and worst philosophies have been expressed on t-shirts. Peace and war, hope and despair, toasters and kittens. So why not Minimates? Well, for starters, DST doesn't make t-shirts. (Apart from the Hunt contest t-shirt, ahem.) It's probably due to some licensing restriction or something. Maybe they wouldn't sell? That doesn't stop me from using a print-on-demand shop to slap my images on a quality garment.
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