This (pretty damn neat) costume was "...kind of inspired by big-head mode seen in videogames. I really wanted to get the faceted geosphere look with wireframe."
Check out more pictures here, along with Eric's description of the process.
| Tagged with: | 3D, Papercraft, Stuff We Like |
One for the Less is Better file, Bobulate asks us to consider the effect of pauses within design:
Walter Benjamin reminds us “architecture is experienced habitually in the state of distraction.” So when a structure that’s always been present on your daily walk suddenly becomes an empty lot, your definition of space and flow changes — there is a pause. And the surrounding environment takes a new form.
Revisiting an old story, Slashdot has a few links that suggest 3D television might have adverse affects on people, particularly children.
Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports, and the project. Unfortunately, the same dangers exist in today's 3D, and the electronics, movie, and gaming industries seem to be ignoring the issue.
Another client post, this time from Andy Rutledge. I tend to agree with his take; designers should own up to more responsibility for a good or bad client experience:
There’s an easy test for evaluating design professionalism. The quality of your client experiences is directly proportional to the quality of your professionalism. If you have “stupid clients” it’s because you’re behaving stupidly to begin with, for we attract what we project. If you’ll stop being stupid, your clients’ IQs will increase dramatically.
Some bad ethics-related press for Dell. It seems they tried to cover up a hardware problem with some shady behavior and got written up in the NYT:
Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.
The broken components had an estimated 97% failure rate, and they're not even going to fix their own lawyers computers? I'll say this: they stayed committed to their own story. To fix the computers would be to admit there was something wrong with them.
| Tagged with: | 3D, Business, Clients, Design Ethics, Four Design Links, Less is Better, Professionalism |
3D seems to be everywhere these days, but is it bad for us? ABC blogger Mark Pesce thinks it might be.
Exposure to the kind of fake-3D we see in movies and video games can affect a person's real-world depth perception. Unless a different technology comes along, Pesce argues that viewing 3D in this way for long periods of time could cause permanent perceptual damage(!).
But the media companies must have thought of this, right? Not really:
All of this is rolling forward without any thought to the potential health hazards of continuous, long-term exposure to 3D. None of the television manufacturers have done any health & safety testing around this. They must believe that if it's safe enough for the cinema, it's fine for the living room. But that's simply not the case. Getting a few hours every few weeks is nothing like getting a few hours, every single day.
To follow up on this question of ethics, what about 3D accessibility, as well?
Even if it proves to be harmless (which I doubt -- more on that next week), as it turns out, some people can't see 3D. It bears noting than an experience should not require 3D, or one risks excluding at least some of the audience.
As designers, it seems as though we ought to be more careful in our application of 3D.
| Tagged with: | 3D, Advertising, Business, Design Ethics, Four Design Links, Muriel Cooper, Responsibility, Videos |
The new logo for the Cooper Union starts with heavily abstracted 3D letterforms and then adds enough motion to create a piece that is greater than the sum of its own parts. I think the simplicity is what really makes it successful. Too many animated logos are generative affairs that don't perform well in practice. Any static frame of the Cooper Union logo is recognizable as a branded part of the whole. That makes it a winner in my book.
| Tagged with: | 3D, Animation, Blog Less, Cooper Union, Logo |
Last time, we converted our 3D rendering into vectors. We left off with a Photoshop file which we’re going to finish today with textures and shading.
First things first, I made a slight mistake in the last tutorial that I need to correct. Luckily, there’s a quick fix.
In the previous version of the graphic, I colored in the vectors with shading. This certainly makes the image more interesting, but shading so early not a good idea, as we can do it much better with Photoshop.
So, if you’re following along, go ahead and make all of your fills a neutral version of their base color. In my case, it’s mostly brown with a little light gray for the blade. When that’s done, export the file again and you’re ready to go for today’s tutorial.
We left off last time with a high-resolution high-contrast rendering of our model. Now it’s time to explain why.
Here at DLB, we prefer to make most of our assets as vectors. Vectors are mathematical representations of lines (rather than pixels which have a fixed scale) so they are always crisp and perfect at any scale. That’s why we like them so much. We’re absolute neat-freaks, whether it’s geometry or CSS and we don’t like building things more than once.
| Tagged with: | 3D, Graphics, Illustrate!, Illustrator, Tutorial, Vectors |
Before things get rolling, I should say that I’m only going to provide a 1,000 ft. view of our process. This is for two reasons: 1.) every project is different, so the best I can do is provide a summary of the steps we take, and 2.) this needs to fit into a digestible blog post, so I can’t be too verbose with my details (lest I venture into QED territory). If there is enough demand, in the future I can write up something more in-depth.
In general, there are four steps to generating a graphic from a 3D object the DLB way:
1. get a model, 2. render the model, 3. vectorize the rendering, 4. style the graphic.
We’ll cover steps 1 and 2 today and finish off 3 and 4 in future posts.
