Cats at Play

 

Dogs Playing Poker eat your heart out

Would you like to play a nice game of chess?

 

This is the first of my explorations in 3D graphics this year.  The last time I spent time in building 3D scenes I was working on my own ray tracer in graduate school.

This image was composed and rendered using Blender 4.0 ( http://blender.org ) .  It is fantastic that this powerful tool is free.  Lilah helped out with the design of the Queen's crowns.  Each piece on the board had its own challenges.  

Thank you Mr. Taudel, my high school sophomore technical drawing teacher, who taught the basics of front, side and top views using pencils and a trusty wooden t-square.  Additional thanks to id software, 3D realms, and Epic Games who inspired me with their built-in level editors for DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D, and Unreal Tournament. Final shout out to Ken Perlin ( https://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/ ) who taught me the fundamentals of computer graphics and helped us each write our own ray-tracers, deal with 3d transformations along with other elements of kinematics and rendering.  Thanks :)

Cycle of Circuits

 

The construction of this was more challenging than I anticipated. This took about 3 hours of wall-clock time sorting out the different effects and grid design.  However, as compensation I have some decent elements here that will work nicely into other creations.  While I was finishing up on this one, I got my idea for at least one piece based on this theme.

Enjoy!

Jellyfish Jazz

 One of the fun parts of my earlier work was the experimentation with different kinds of brushes. Today, I played with shifting hues based on pressure.

Made while riding the commuter bus.

I experimented with several transparent blacks when forming the palette here.

חג שמח

Mountains at Sunrise

 

Illogical Institute

 

This came to me while walking to the office yesterday.