That auto-drive is what I am always wishing for at night on 11 hr drives.

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Ah Cookie Monster..
Interesting side story- whenever I travel abroad, I often get pulled aside for random searches. I have found though that wearing a Sesame Street T-shirt helps- "Hmm- he looks like a terrorist, but darn it- thats Cookie Monster- he's alright" Thanks Cookie.

Album Art Challenge made the rounds at the office today.

1) Click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

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2) Click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

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3) Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4) Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Last Saturday Ben Thomas and I had a great time at Auburn University. It was a long session, as we tried to pack in as much information as we could on sketching and rendering. Hopefully students found the session helpful. A good chunk of the time was spent on a student project. We brainstormed on possible functionality, sketched in a lot of rough concepts and rendered one of the rough sketches to a finished form. Ben demonstrated his Painter techniques in rendering a nailer. He has a great way of explaining as he works. I tend to clam up and keep quiet. Between the two of us hopefully there was enough communication.
We were also encouraged to see the improvement in student work from last year. Here is a pdf of some of the rough development sketches that we worked on.

Thanks again to Shea Tillman and Louisa Stowers from the IDSA, who organized everything at Auburn, and a shoutout to Alerick from the core77 boards :).

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090211/ap_on_hi_te/tec_techbit_piano_touch
Sweet! Kevin Huang a friend of mine from OSU was in the news lately. We were hallmates our freshman year. He developed a glove that aids in learning piano.

Very informative booklet on metal stamping here

Now thats a Corvette that I'd like to see put in production
via carbodydesign.com

Maxwell Render Test: definitely nicer render overall. Took an afternoon to render.

Photoview Raw Render: 12min Used the channels to select the background

Crop and Rotate for effect

Raw Render:20 min

Touched up

We were doing a Maxwell and Photoview 360 comparison with the CAD file of an RC car for Sears. The RC car was designed by Doug Ritterling, the current head of design at Emerson.

This is the second time Ben and I doing this session at Auburn University. It was a lot of fun the first time. We are looking forward to this session.

Maker Profile - Kinetic Wave Sculptures on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

ILoveSketch No-Cut Demo: Spacecraft from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

:( Everytime I see Ilovesketch, extreme feelings of jealousy for the lucky designer running that demo spring up inside me

http://www.simonhoegsberg.com/we_are_all_gonna_die/slider.html
Cool presentation and photos.

Local blogger from Greenville SC. weirdotoys.com -my kind of site

Little update- getting more comfortable with the tool-set.

Screenshots from 3d-coatSoftware found at http://www.3d-coat.com Look for the alpha software download in the forums for the volumetric sculpting version

I have been using a program called 3d-coat the last few days. 3d-coat started off as a texturing tool but has now added volumetric sculpting. This is really cool because it means that you can carve your sculpt with no regard to a base mesh as in other apps like Zbrush and Silo. Carving holes are much easier. It is literally like 3D photoshop. (The image above though is a paintover in PS)

The goggle images below are screenshots from the program. This is definitely not a CAD tool, though I suppose that you could retopologize the high polygon meshes to send it through t-splines. However the ease of changing the crease direction and the ease with which you can sculpt can definitely spark new thought. The interface leaves a lot to be desired. It is definitely the product of a computer programmer. On the other hand Andrew, the lone programmer of this program is an extremely responsive developer. The program might not be pretty but it incorporates a lot of functionality..fast.