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 :)