Second Life

Creating my avatar in second life was a challenge. I began by assuming that the skin only needed to be stretched around the template by expanding the cheeks and basically leaving the nose, mouth, and eyes sections alone. However, I later found out that it was crucial to the proper look of your avatar to manipulate all these sections to properly fit the grid. After my skin had been posted I also wondered why it did not look like me at all - until I found the head shape manipulation tool which sorting those issues out. My original self comes fully equipped with my own color hair and eyes as well as my "nerd-glasses" that I believe are inseparable from myself. My alternative or imaginary avatar I composed keeping in mind my future desires and, at the risk of sounding overly materialistic, I wished to define my imagined self as a rich 1920 steel tycoon. I think the connotation associated with this personality does accurately express particular aspects of my own character traits, however this is keeping in mind the good traits as well. All the objects on my imaginary avatar are from my own creation as I could not find suitable replicas I wished to adorn myself with that were to my liking of both aesthetic and cost.

Reading Ch. 2 Questions

1.) Historically the practice of art has been relatively centralized around the concept that art is found within the piece itself however, as stated in the reading, challenging that idea is the growing significance of concept and context. From this stems the art form of conceptualism as well as minimalism which both gradually remove the boundaries between what is commonly considered "art and every-day life." However, given this gradual regression or progression, is there a point where the representational difference becomes too insignificant to arouse popular support? Is minimalism and conceptualism too representational of "non-art" to succeed as "art" in itself?

2.) Vostell and Paik "re-contextualized" the monitor and sparked the beginning of intellectual, conceptual, and aesthetic discussion concerning the new medium of TV. This discussion opened up routes for sub-categorical deliberation among narrative, dairy, and other critique facets of the "new" medium of choice. However, throughout the critique development of TV, artists distinguished themselves apart from the "commercialized television engineers" by defining their actions and thought processes as purely "interested in the mechanisms of video as they functioned artistically." Yet, in the intellectual, physical, and cognitive actions of such artists especially in displaying of art through the video/TV medium, aren't the endeavors of such artists, be it intellectual, conceptual, narrative, diary-like, etc. paralleling the endeavors of "commercialized television engineers?" or is the difference between endeavors "artistically" approached and approached as "art" substantial enough to warrant these artists truly different from commercialized TV engineers?

Extra Credit Evaluation

Although it took 7 minutes, it was 7 hearty minutes of sincerity :)

3D "The Sequel"

 

 



This project was particularly troublesome and very time-consuming. I wound up starting and restarting over 4 different times. The trickiest part to overcome was the hot-keys crucial to success with Blender. I started basically by creating a cylinder and then modifying it slowly to add more faces and divisions in the correct areas. The creation of the tubes of the heart all came about the same way. Through the layout of a path and then attaching a circle to that line and extending it using the line as a path. From there I merged the objects and had a rudimentary outline of the my heart piece. However, there were still many issues, among them: resizing the heart (particularly the back), the merging of the tubes to the body of the heart, the creation of indentations and creases along the body, as well as final coloration and texturing.

Resizing was aided immensely by the sculpture mode offered by Blender and the grab tool which I used to grab large portions of the surface and thus modify large portions of the shape. The build-up of many other areas, as well as indentation was also done through the sculpting mode. However, it wasn't until strange glitching pixel parts appeared that I had realized there was a problem. Through later intense research I had solved it however by "enabling dynamic" sculpting which adds faces as the original face is stretched or modified in any other way. Seams between the tubes and body also posed a great issue to overcome. Through extremely tedious and laborious work however most of the seams are hardly noticeable. Indentations and creases throughout the piece were added by the crease tool in the sculpting brush library. This actually also helped massively with the merging of the tubes to the body as well. On the backside of the heart in particular I decided to crease the line of the back tube instead of adding another tube to the body. I think it worked quite effectively and I love the way it looks especially in comparison to the original. However, compared to the last issue of texturing and coloring these other hiccups seem very small.

Coloring was a considerable issue due to the frame rate I had steadily been decreasing through the final product of (in sculpting mode) 2,936,468 vertices. Eventually I solved the issue by finding every color selection bar and turning it to the maroon color of my heart since I could not locate which one actually affected the surface appearance of the piece. Texturing was another issue and one that led to two restarts of the four total. I realized early on that I would need to finish my piece before adding any color or texture so I did, but when the time came to add a new texture I could not and it resulted in two computer crashes (even with a bunch of RAM.) I went through numerous loopholes to attempt to attach an image of my heart surface even without adjusting the "normal" so as to add texture. UV unwrap was impossible due to the unsymmetrical nature of my piece as well as the copious amounts of vertices, every other option as well displayed only the copy of the heart with no texture or image for me to paste or fit to that heart. I went through numerous textures and formatting issues wondering what it could have been but ultimately the texturing did not happen. I had also even downloaded a bump-map free program trial for a texture to apply. In it the initial input image gave me numerous results for texture application including specularity, displacement, normal map, occlusion, and diffusion. Should it have worked with the end result 3D model would have been amazing, I had tried it on a plane within Blender as well just to see and it worked fabulously, but given all attempts the following pictures for node mapping could not be applied (occlusion image not included):

 

 

However, through the many hours spent on this project and the numerous work-arounds I had considerable fun and am eager to learn more about the Blender program partially due to the many tutorials I watched to learn specific skills and witnessing many of the incredible things possible through it. I believe ultimately, despite the absence of a texture other than a light diffusion, that the 3D model replica of Passion was successful and very accurate in its resemblance to the original.