Mr. Jiggle Cube

Just Recently I created a fully animatable rounded cube character. His Armature facilitates the movement of each of his corners independently but also provides handles for rotating entire sides.




There are two types of side rotators: Two main rotators for the front and back, and four inner rotators for each side to do smaller moves such as wiggling. The two main front and back rotators are the parents of the two inner front and back rotators so these inner rotators' actions should be relative to their parent (I think). This setup makes it very easy to animate Mr. Jiggle Cube without having to adjust each of the corners for each move.

Of course since he is supposed to be a jiggly cube, when he hits the ground he needs deform according to the impact, but I could not figure out how to do that with just bones so you have to use shape keys instead.

I spent two afternoons trying to think of a good story for an animated short, but I couldn't think of a good one so I'm just going to have to keep this one in the back of my mind for now.

If you're interested, you can find the .blend file here.

Cambodia Animation

This is an animation I did for my church using land, cloud, and topographic maps from NASA Visible Earth. Overall, it took me around 30-50 hours to create because I was using ray transparency, which makes for really slow test renders. It took me a lot longer than it could have, but there was a lot a tweaking to the different settings too.


Be sure to follow this link to see the HD version: Cambodia Animation in HD

you can find the blend file here

Final Version of American Flag

Here is the final version of my American Flag Picture. Only some minor adjustments.

I decided not to put a dirt texture on the flag because I'm not very good at textures and the one I tried looked like splattered dirt which doesn't make sense for a billboard.

I also opted not to put a cloud texture on the moons halo because it gave too much of an atmospheric effect which I wanted to avoid because I wanted this to look like one of those really clear nights you see out in the country away from city lights

Not one of my best works, and lacking in detail, but cool nevertheless.

Click for a full-res picture

One thing that I would like to point out is that the peeling paint texture in the bottom corner of the flag often initially looks like bumps instead of peeling paint. this is because we are so used to seeing textures with the light coming from the top that when we see one where its coming from the bottom, our mind reverses the texture making it inside-out.

The texture used was Stucci-Voronoi Crackle.

American Flag Project

I've been working on this for about a week, trying to get it to look more photorealistic, but I can't think of anything else to do.

I started this out of boredom by drawing flags on inkscape, and was inspired to do a 3D version.

American Flag by Day

Foggy Night

Clear night

What do you think?

Just as a note, one thing that is bothering me is the texture for peeling paint around the corners of the flag.