A friend of mine got married a while ago and since I wanted to give them something special as a wedding present I decided to code a game boy game starring him and his wife.

This was my first game boy game and I coded it in C using gbdk. I did the sprites in grafx2 and used tiled for doing maps (using a simple exporter plug in i wrote). Next time I’ll probably code the game in ASM instead but since this one was really simple I didn’t have any problems with performance.

I bought a usb cartridge from kitch-bent, loaded it with the game and gave it to them together with a game boy color (I know, a DMG would have been way cooler).

Thanks to my great friend daandruff I’ve been getting into Game Boy development lately. I’m doing some coding (I’ll post here as soon as I’ve got something to show) and of course a bit of art. I’ve always loved doing pixel art and the game boy, with its four shades of greenish grey, turned out to be really fun to work with.

Modelled in blender, rendered with 3Deight

Over at blenderartists.org there’s an ongoing competition called the “Weekend Challenge”, where you have from friday to monday to complete a quick picture. I find these challenges a fun motivation to actually get some simple illustrations done.

The theme this week was “onomatopoeia” and it turns out there’s a comic book villain called exactly that. His “thing” is that he repeats all sounds he hears, like saying “blam” after shooting somone. Apart from that he’s badass (almost kills both batman and the joker) and looks fricking cool, so my choice of subject was pretty given.

Modeling was done in blender using subdivision surfaces and a traditional poly-by-poly technique. For this model I was actually lazy enough that I didn’t use any reference pictures. Since I had the real razor in my hand I just winged it.
I guess that’s a pretty good exercise to do for practice (although not one to try if you’re modeling for a customer ).

The biggest challenge with doing a hard-edge model like this is probably avoiding “bumps” and uneven surfaces. Frequent use of blenders smooth tool helps in this aspect, as well as a constant tabbing in and out of edit mode and moving vertices by small amounts (yeah, you know what I’m talking about, polygon pushers)
However, sometimes you fool yourself by trying to fix an issue with your model just to realize that the physical object has exactly that imperfection as well.
In this case I was working on the area around the power button, trying to get it smooth and to avoid the dent you see in the picture below. But when I took a closer look on the real thing I noticed it had exactly the same dent. So in this case keeping a modeling “flaw” actually meant a more realistic image. Lucky me!

Water simulation was done inside Houdini, most of all because I’m trying to get into the software and this was a good excuse to try out the fluid simulation tools.
I used the fantastic flip fluids to simulate the big splash. Basically it’s just a plane of water I’m throwing at the razor from behind.
The flying droplets and the drops on the surface of the model was made using meta balls and two pretty simple pop-setups (pops are Houdini’s awesome particle node system). The model was then exported to blender as an obj file and I added a subsurf modifier for good measure

Shading was probably the quickest part of the process since the materials on the object are pretty simple, and also thanks to the blazingly fast response time of cycles.
What I did to get as quick a preview as possible was to make the rendered viewport really small. This assured that the image got noise free almost instantly, and I could still check all details by just zooming in with the viewport at that particular area.

There’s basically two kind of materials on the razor, metal and plastic.
Creating a metal material is as simple as it gets. I used the Glossy BSDF and just played with the roughness setting.
As for the plastic I created a primitive node group, similar (if not identical) to the “FresnelBlend” material Brecht has set up in the sample scene, using a Mix Closure, a Fresnel and both a Glossy and a Diffuse BSDF.
The Glossy BSDF make up the specular part while the Diffuse BSDF make up the… well, diffuse part. Changing the parameter I called “Reflection” changes how much reflection you get and the roughness setting sets the glossiness (feels like I’m stating the obvious).
One problem I’ve run into with cycles is that you cannot add more than one mix Closure to the same material without getting weird results. Things like this are to be expected, since cycles is alpha software, but I thought it would be a good thing to share.

Lighting setup was pretty straight forward as well.
I used a plane with emitter material on either side of the model and a big one from behind.
The planes have the material shown in the picture below, to keep them from occluding geometry from the camera. This makes them completely invisible, while they still give of light (like the “hide from camera” setting present in many renderers).

The background is just a plane with a texture. In my experience cycles doesn’t render alpha channels nicely yet so it was easier adding a real background than doing it in post.

Quite a lot of the materials are “grainy” in real life and the simplest way of getting this result is just to stop the rendering before the image is to clean. I kind of like the subtle graininess you get from rendering at a large resolution and keeping some of the noise.

I guess that’s it. If you have any questions feel free to ask me at vidar [dot] nelson [at] gmail.com or @vidarn

Modelled in blender and houdini, rendered with cycles.

At work we recently got this small injection molder. The thought was to try using it together with molds created in our 3d-printer. Turns out it works great. We now have a fast and easy way to create real plastic prototypes of any 3d-model.

The mold above was modelled in rhino and printing it took maybe three hours. Creating each plastic piece takes about a minute as you can see in the video, and the plastic is next to free (we’ve even tried smelting old shampoo bottles, in which case it actually is free). Man, i’m exited! Next up is creating custom dice and miniatures for the d&d campaign me and a couple of colleagues are running.

There’s pictures on the process of printing the mold at flickr.

My first shot at using cycles, the new renderer being developed for blender.

Modelled in blender, rendered in Luxrender.

I’m not really happy with the dots on the bottle. Right now they are done with a displacement map. I tried modeling them by hand but ran into way to many problems with that :/ I’ll give it some more thought and maybe post an update.

Go to the Sketchbook