The Showcase

Photography

Photographs

So, lately, I've had the pleasure of working with DSLR cameras, and have improved my ability of taking digital images in manual mode (manually adjusting exposure, balance, Fval, Tval, etc). Here are some of my (better) results.

Renders

And here is one of my recent rendered images (against with Blender). I haven't had too much time lately, but I put a lot of time into creating this rendering. There's a few things I could improve upon, but until school is over I don't have the time to improve it.

Renderings update

Some More Renders

Here are some more renders I've worked on the past few weeks.

Montreal

Two weekends ago, I went to montreal with some friends. This resulted in some new panoramics, and just some generally cool pictures.

Panoramics

Photos

More Smileys?

Oh Look

This one is almost a play on the original smiley in the grass that I made a few months ago. I would even go as far as to call it an improvement, but I'll let you be the judge of that. I see this smiley has found himself a partner.

Panoramic

Wide Angles

The pictures below are various panoramas I have created throughout my travels over the past few years. All pictures were taken by myself, and stitched together using the Hugin panorama tools.

River: New Hampshire

Narrow River: Rhode Island

Prospect Park: Troy, New York

Niagara Falls: Niagara, Ontario

Central Park: New York City

East Bay to Manhattan: New York City

Syracuse University: Syracuse, New York

Syracuse Suburbs: Syracuse, New York

Smileys!

There's more!

So I've been working on more renders during my free time. They've come out quite nicely, I think. Some of them are of the smiley faces and some aren't... all of them were made using Blender. This is what I do when I get bored, I suppose.

Meta Objects

And I also had some fun with blender's metaspheres as well as Depth of Field generation and a bloom-like glow!

Swine Flu Analysis

Swine Flu.. A long time coming

I did an experiment when the good old was out and about a while ago. My program collected tweets on twitter every 15 seconds, analyzed them for swine flu references, and if there was a reference, put a dot on the graph. As you can see, exactly five days after the initial scare, people dramatically stopped caring.

I am curious what certain peaks mean in the graph, and I was able to correlate some of them with events. Other peaks, such as the one at +204 hours puzzle me. I was never able to find a reference to why it jumped. The blank from +246 to +252 hours was a power outage on the computer collecting the data.

3D Lightning

3D Lightning Generation and Rendering

For a school project me and my friend designed a method to generate 3D lightning that looked realistic, and to be able to render it in a scene with a ray tracer. We wrote the paper to describe out method.

New Art

Free Time Makes Art

Well, the past few weeks I've been working on more of my 3D modeling skills. I've improved in the creation of cloud systems, environments, and hair (which includes grass, as strange as that may sounds). Here are some more pictures that I've put together:

Hope you enjoy! Again, click for a full image.

Quotes

Meaningful Quote

Citation: Benjamin Button

For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Renderings

Pretty Pictures

Two weekends ago, I spent some good time with my friend Blender. After getting reaquainted with some test-scenes, I decided to take a shot at some full test scenes. At first, I got stuff like this:

This picture is pretty decent, and it's definitely good for me and took many hours to make, but I don't like how it came out overall.

And Time Passes

I also made this picture, which I consider to be much better:

The smiley in the grass is just.. spiffy. It didn't take all that long to make, and I got to play around with some neat features of blender. For example, I played with collision to prevent grass-smiley intersections, and also with lighting, and depth of field effects. I consider it my best work to date.

Mosaics

Take a Look

Below, you see a picture. It's of the water and a rock. If you just look a little bit closer now, you'll notice that each color in that picture is represented with another picture.

(Click for larger view)

I came up with the idea about two months ago, when I started collecting pictures from public domain websites (i.e. flickr). So far, I've collected roughly 65,000 images, and have created numerous small programs to deal with such a large number of images.

They Move

After a while, I decided it would be a neat idea to make every picture in a full video into a mosaic. I had some free time this past weekend, so I gave it a shot. I optimized the hell out of the program I use to create mosaics, but it still took over 30 hours to turn every frame in the video into a mosaic. For my first attempt, I made the intro credits of Watchmen (provided on their website) into a mosaic.

Unfortunately, the flash video below doesn't do the video justice. Each color in this whole video is actually a still image that my program fetched from the public domain. Over 60k unique images were used in the creation, and in total, 34 million images were chosen to represent the whole video.