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The all new dougplanet?

Nah, just some spring cleaning. I’ve decided to spend an hour or two unifying the look, and make updates easier. The “big eye” that used to greet newcomers has gone, though I may keep an element of that around.

There’s still some work to be done, and I’ll be getting to that soon. I’ve got a lot of images I want to get up in the gallery section.

The original page is here
(Including links to hi-res pics)

This was designed as part of a contest being hosted by clieplanet.com. Since entering it, the original page managed to (unintentionally) fool a fair number of people into believing that the TX75 is a real device being released by Sony. This is patently untrue. To read the threads, one can do a search for TX65 (its origninal name) on the cliesource.com website.

UPDATE: I came in second place in the contest, though I got a few e-mails saying I should have won The prize I recieved is a case for the T665 made by Piel Frama.

It was brought to my attention that it has appeared on a Thai pirate software site. I’ve got a screenshot of that here, with the website name blurred out. I don’t want to condone software piracy, and I won’t mention the person’s name who mentioned the link. But it’s out there

All this has been kind of surprising from a quick little exercise I took upon myself…

For those who like this design, and I know there are some, feel free to send a link to Sony. Maybe it’ll do something. Here’s their “Ask us” page and here’s their Contacts page with e-mail addresses… (These two links now shut off)

For those wanting to know, I designed the 3D model in Lightwave 3D 7.5 and then added text and tweaks in Photoshop.

Design Considerations

When making up the TX75, instead of going the route of an over the top machine that couldn’t really be built with todays technology, I built what I want Sony’s next release to be. Of course, there are a couple of things in there that are unreasonable, such as a Universal CF slot (Sony doesn’t seem to want to do that anytime soon), and the processor speed. Other than that, I think that the TX is entirely capable of being built today. Hopefully Sony will go this route soon, as their latest releases, while interesting, are very niche market oriented, and from the rumblings on many mailing lists and forums, there are many customers starting to look elsewhere.

Although I’m definitely not a loyalist to ANY brand, the Sony Clie line over the past year or so has been just incredible, and their design team has designed some PDAs that look better than any competitor has ever done. Sony has shown that they know industrial design, and I hope that a TX75 type device is due to be announced soon…

Note: This is just a quick example of controlling gradient alphas, so there’s not a lot of screen shots. In other words, this tutorial assumes you know LW basics. If you don’t want to read this whole tutorial, I’ve included the object, image and scene file here.

Now, let’s get on with the show.

1. Make a piece of paper in Modeler. For this example, I’m using a sheet of paper 3m by 4m by 10cm which is a pretty thick stack of paper, actually. But this is just an example, and you can figure it out from here . It is centered X,Y and Z axis.

2. Name the default surface “Paper”. I gave it a dark blue surface to make things more visible. Now, select just the polygon facing the Z- (Z minus) direction, and rename it “PaperFront”. Give it the same surface settings though (The same dark blue).

3. Save the object as paper.lwo

4. Open Layout, and load paper.lwo

5. Add a Null and keep at it’s 0,0,0 position for now. You can rename it PrintHead if you like.

6. Open the Surfaces Panel, and go the the surface “PaperFront”. Click on the Texture Editor for the Color channel (the little T button to the right)

7. Make the first layer an image map, with planar projection in the Z axis. Load an image (mine’s called paper.tga – a 32 bit image, we’ll see later why).

(what the image layer looks like)

8. Click on Automatic size, and it will be placed there all snug as a bug in a rug.(You can do a test render of a frame right now, just to make sure it’s showing up.

)9. Still in the Texture Editor, add a new Gradient Layer. Make the Blending Mode -> Alpha and the Opacity 100%.

10.. Make the Input Parameter “Y Distance to Object” Select the Null object that you may have called PrintHead.

11. Now to creat the printing effect. On the Gradient Bar, you’ll see a Start (0m) and an End (10m).
a) change the End to (4m).
b) change the Start Color to black.
c) make a new key by clicking on the bar. Change it’s parameter to 3.9m. Make sure it’s colour is black as well.
d) make a new key below the last one.
e) change it’s color to white, and make sure the parameter is 4m (equal to the End value)

12. Click on use texture. Here’s what it looks like…

13. Do a “Save All Objects” and save your scene.

14. Now for testing…

a) With the Null at 0,0,0 hit F9. You’ll see a blue sheet of paper, like the image below. No image at all! That’s because the gradient is less than 4m away from any point (in the Y direction) of the PaperFront surface.

b) Move the null up to EXACTLY 2m on the Y axis and create a key. Do another test render. You’ll see a blue sheet with a thin white strip (the image below). This is the gradient alpha in effect. The slight gradient you see is the distance between 3.9m and 4m, as set up in the gradient layer. To make the transition sharper, you can play with the distance between the two keys, or chang the default spline to Stepped or whatever suits your purposes.

c) Move the null up to EXACTLY 4m on the Y axis and create a key. Do another test render. Now you should see the bottom half of your image, while the top half is still blue. Pretty cool, eh?

d) Move the null up EXACTLY 6m on the Y axis and create a key. Do another test render. You’ll see your image in all it’s glory.

Instead of a plain blue base, you just change it to your paper color, add any bump textures etc and you have your paper. Earlier, I mentioned a 32-bit image. If you have an alpha of your image, you can use that to cut out the background of your image, so that your results would be something like the following.

To keep things neat, you could limit the Null’s motion to the Y axis only, as well as parent the Null to the paper object. Of course, you can change the parameters of the Null gradient to suit your size of paper and all that fun stuff.

Well, that about does it for this little example of gradient tricks. Let me know if you’ve enjoyed this by dropping me a line at doug@dougplanet.com

NOTE: This was whipped up really fast just to demonstrate how to make the curved rests for a cigarette ashtray using Sub-Patches. It’s pretty basic, but may come in handy. I really should update it to include Bandsaw, but it was really written for a specific person. I’m just adding it as content here

(assuming you want 4 holders, which is pretty standard, though you could make it using any number, you just have to do the math for how big of a wedge you need to make…)

1. In Modeler, draw a cross section of the ashtray. Use the Lathe tool to make that a 90 degree wedge. If you want three holders, make a 120 degree wedge. To calculate it for any number of holders, divide 360 degrees by N (number of holders). Simple really You should now have a wedge something like the one below (Fig 01)

(you can see in the cross section I created, I use VERY simple geomety, to keep the initial poly count pretty low.)

Fig 01

Now, select four top points, such as in the above diagram, and drag them down so you get a wedge shape in the top, such as Fig 02

Fig 02

At this point, I would also recommend deleting the two cross section polygons that are created when the Lathe is performed. They could cause issues later. They are the highlighted wedges in Fig 02. Once you do so, you should have something like Fig 03.

Fig 03

Now, subdivide your object once. When you do that, you can tweak the shape of the cigarette holders with the added points, to make the curve smoother. It’s up to you if you want to triple your polygons at this point. Some would, some won’t. I did for this example. When tripled, you avoid the whole non-planar polygon issue. You should have something like Fig 04 at this point.

Fig 04

Now you can use the mirror tool once each on the X and Z axis to make a complete ashtray. Make sure you merge your points or you’ll get some weird surfacing at these seams. Voila, an ashtray. I didn’t do this step for the sake of this quicky tutorial.You can hit the TAB key to smooth it out, and this will also allow you to adjust the level of detail depending on how close to the camera you want the ashtray to get. Something like Fig 05

Fig 05

Below is a rendered version. This way you avoid the annoyance of >4 sided polys, and weird geometry.

Nothing fancy, just simple methodology.

Well, that about does it. Let me know if you’ve enjoyed this by dropping me a line at doug@dougplanet.com, (or if you thought it was a waste of bandwidth, but if so, then why did you read the whole thing

Originally post on the Newtek forums Thursday, January 24, 2002 – 02:48 pm:

I’m working on a new plugin called the “Make My Character Walk” button. The main parameters are determining the characters sex, amount of realism desired and speed. The fourth parameter is Type,
which presents options for the type of walk. Here is a screen shot…

Here are some of the other types available.

Well, that about does it. Let me know if you’ve enjoyed this by dropping me a line at doug@dougplanet.com, (or if you thought it was a waste of bandwidth, but if so, then why did you read the whole thing

I found the following sitting on my old site For those who remember the craze when it first hit, it may bring back memories. The whole thing seemed to really build up in the gaming community, and for a while, anybody playing CounterStrike had to put up with people sending the messages over and over and over. For those who aren’t familiar with the whole All Your Base Are Belong To US phenom, this page probably makes no sense whatsoever, but I’d recommend doing a google for AYBABTU and find the video that started it all. Or try, AYBABTU on wiki. Anyways, I post it here, because there may be interest (though I doubt it).

For great justice!