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Game of Thrones Fan Art Contest

The folks over at Cornucopia3D are holding a Game of Thrones Fan Art Contest all this month, until June 30th. Create a landscape, city, hamlet, or castle from Westeros. Or you can illustrate an event from the George R.R. Martin book series or the TV show they made from it, such as a coronation, treaty negotiation, battle, or assassination. Of course, you can not use any copyright images from either source, you will have to create your own original artwork inspired by the series. There are a few other rules, which you can get from their web site, along with a list of the prizes. If you don’t feel like entering the contest but want to show off some of your artwork they have a ton of non-contest galleries you can upload to as well.

They also have some software and 3D modeling resources you might find useful, including a free copy of Vue 2014 Pioneer. If you haven’t used Vue before, it is one of the best 3D modeling programs available for easily creating terrains and landscapes, from a single scene to an entire mountain range or planet. The Pioneer version is a full product, not crippleware or a limited time trial, but it is their entry-level version. There are modules you can buy to upgrade it to some of the functionality of the other versions, such as 3D model importing with bone rigging and texture/bump mapping, but it is a great way to get started on creating your own worlds.

Happy Tokyo Dance Trooper

It has been a bit since I featured the Tokyo Dance Trooper, Danny Choo, in this blog, so I figure it is time to do it again. He still has the moves, the attitude, and the armor! He still gets my vote as the best choice for this project. And then, just because you don’t feel like a guy dancing down the street in full Storm Trooper armor isn’t Nerd Enough for you, see what he does when he gets his hands on a series of dolls, and starts building their robotic control interfaces into them. Be sure to check out smartdoll.jp to get all the details. Unless you really want ALL the details about how Danny used 3D printing to create a Rapid Prototyping Environment which allowed him to create the dolls based on his anime/manga in the first place, which gave him the baseline physical model he started building his robots on. If you feel the need for that level of detail, you will find it here.

CAE Linux LiveDVD

The Live DVD build CAE Linux is a complete engineering toolkit for designing, simulating, testing, and creating/printing your own projects. Everything in the build is free and open source software, allowing you to design your device, do multiphysics simulations to optimize it, and generate the code for building it with 3D printing & milling. You can also design and develop your own printed circuit boards, and microcontroller circuits for automation. Not only do you not need to pay for a license for any of this (because of the GNU/Creative Commons licensing it comes with), you don’t even have to install it on your computer; it all runs directly off the DVD, being a Live Disc. This is pretty much the most powerful open source engineering package I know of, if you have any interest in the design and creation of anything from toy cars to advanced robotics, do yourself a favor and check out this build. You can find the download here, although I recommend visiting their home page to learn all about it and see what kind of support resources are also available.

Animation Training for Daz

Daz 3D is a powerful free 3D modeling and animation software package that has everything you could want to create your own animations. Mind, if you are not careful, the content store may drain your wallet in short order. But that is mostly a problem for the lazy, who are not willing to do the work to create their own stuff when they can just buy it off the shelf.

Once you have downloaded and installed the free software package, knowing how to use it would be pretty useful, so some tutorials would help out. As with most training and tutorials, any of these concepts apply equally to a lot of different software packages that do the same general job. The major real differences between them are what the buttons are called and which menu they live in, although each program seems to have 1 to 3 things it can do with a click that the other programs need a procedure for. So if you use a different program for your 3D modeling and rendering, most of the info will apply once you figure out where those buttons live in your software.

The first one is a basic intro to 3D modeling and animation, demonstrating the basic components any animation is made of. Once you understand what the components are, it is just a mater of learning how to do each of them in whichever program you prefer, and finally how to put them together to create your finished product. The second tutorial is about the program itself, Daz Studio, showing you where these functions live in this software and how to use them. Again, most of the concepts work in any software, so you might want to at least watch it once, even if you use a different program. And if you don’t already have a 3D modeling software package you prefer to work in, then I recommend downloading and installing either Daz or Blender, as the best free 3D programs on the market today. There are more tutorials where these came from, keep your eyes open and you will find a lot of good ones.

Ubuntu Studio Live DVD

Another excellent collection of creative software for the artist, animator, movie maker, musician, and publisher built into a Boot-From-DVD Live distro, Ubuntu Studio is ready to help you make some amazing stuff. While they don’t have the huge range of software Open Artist contains, what they do have still covers a lot of ground, and almost all of it is very powerful, stable, intuitive, and user friendly. There is a definite advantage in having access to tools you don’t need to go through a steep learning curve to get a useful result out of, after all.

The workflows they cover are audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing, and within each workflow they include an entire suite of tools for each step of the process. And while I dearly love the large selection of utilities in Open Artist, it can get a bit confusing at times when you just want to crank out your project. It is very nice to have a toolkit available where the best (or at least most commonly used) program for each step is at your fingertips, leaving you no ambiguity about what to launch as you go through creating your masterpiece, in whatever medium.

The latest release is built on Ubuntu 13.10 (Codename: Saucy Salamander), and it has all the latest and greatest updates for all the software. But because it is that new, and not fully vetted for the long haul, it is only supported for the next 4 months. Early adapters will want to go that way, but most folks will probably find the build layered onto Ubuntu 12.04 (Codename: Precise Pangolin), which is supported through 2017, a more reasonable way to go.

Any way you approach this software package, I suspect you will find it a very valuable addition to your creative arsenal. I certainly keep booting the disc over and over and use it to create new things, so I suspect you might find it as interesting after you have seen it a few times.