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I have to say that I was a little cautious about Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark but he was excellent in the film and the Iron Man model was amazing.  In this blog we’ll talk a little bit about the suit and what it took to make it real.

The Movie

The movie was fantastic!  It takes you through the transformation of Tony Stark.  From a careless billionaire weapons manufacturer to a self made hero, fighting the good fight. First movie produced by Marvel, and it shows.  Jeff Bridges also surprised me, although I kept thinking he was going to say “Duuuude!” in reference to “The Big Lebowski.”  If you haven’t seen Iron Man, you owe it to yourself because, its not only a good movie, but the first in a series of Marvel productions leading to the Avengers Movie. 

The IronMan Suit

The suit is extraordinary! Over 1,933 pieces of geometry for the Mark III suit.  Most of those pieces were animated as the suit was being assembled or while the suit was in-flight as control surfaces. It took 3+ hours to render each frame of Iron Man when he was in motion.  Film is 24 frames per second,  that’s a heck of a lot of processing power! They did build a physical suit for Robert Downey Jr. to wear but when he found out how well they could composite the suit over his frame, he told the director he was not wearing the physical suit!  He wanted full range of motion, so they ended up doing the CG Iron Man suit for most of the film, about 410 separate shots for ILM alone.

So where do I get one of them there whatchamacallits?

So you think Superheroes are all fiction?  We are closer than you may think to having Powered Armor.  Recently the US Military purchased a company that built a powered exoskeleton, that can lift hundreds of pounds for hours with out the user getting tired.  And in Japan they have redesigned the exoskeleton to be as sleek, and sexy as the Iron Man armor.  It gets better,  the company creating this cybernetic armor is called Cyberdyne, as in the company that created Skynet in the Terminator franchise. The development of these technologies is mainly for the assistance and replacement of lost or non working limbs.  But imagine, a few more years down the line and I’ll be my one One Man Army!  Super powered Storm Trooper Armor, here I come!

-Juan

Ironman

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Although I am probably biased, there is a great article on TIME.com today featuring a certain 3D content site that you may have visited recently. Please check out the Thomas Grose 3D Comes to Web 2.0 article that is all about your very own 3DVIA.com.

“The hosted services and communities of Web 2.0 already amount to an entirely new form of communication. But now a new site called 3DVIA.com is taking the social-networking concept to another dimension — both literally and, well, virtually.” [ Read the Full Article ]

If you are not familiar with TIME.com, it is the online version of Time Magazine which has over 3,250,000 subscribers and is read by nearly 10 million people each week.

Do you have Digg account?
Please Digg the TIME article above.

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That is the question isn’t it?  After you spend all this time making this wonderful 3D Model, you have to work in 2D space to create the UV’s.  Barbarism! you say?  But its true.  In today’s blog we’ll go into what UV’s are and why they are so important.

UV’s

UV’s are 2D representations of vertices on your 3D Mesh.  It’s best to think of your 3D model as wearing a skin tight wrap, and in order to put a flat texture on a 3D wrap, you are going to have to make some cuts and flatten it out evenly. After you apply the texture to the 3D model, any wrinkles or overlaps on your UV’s will show up as distortions on your texture. Luckily you have some tools to help you in this process.  In the image above you can see the UV’s on the cylinder on the left, and the UV’s in the editor on the right.  3D in a 2D space.   Notice also how I’ve moved some of the UV’s and it hasn’t affected the shape of the cylinder. UV’s only affect the texture space on the model.  Great UV’s mean great textures.

UV Editor/Unwrap UV Modifier

The UV Editor is your first tool for sorting out the unique problem presented by a 3D object in a 2D space. Your first step to a great texture is to apply a checked material to the model as you fix the UV’s.  This way you can get rid of the big distortions and make sure each shell (sections of uv meshes) is relative in size to the rest of the model. Next up you want to make sure there are no overlapping UV’s.  In the image above you can see the top set of UV’s has overlapping, and the checkered texture comes out garbled and stretched.  The lower set of UV’s removed the overlap by setting the top and bottom caps separately, and by having the vertical faces all laid out flat and uniform. UV’s are normally a longer process than actually creating your 3D Model so make sure you give yourself the time to do it correctly.

Pelting

Like the hunters of old, pelting is a process by which you can take your mesh and flatten it out almost automatically, by selecting seams along your UV mesh.   If you had a 3D model of a bear, and you used a pelting tool, your UV’s  would looks like a bear rug after the process.  Seams are UV shell borders.  Pelting works by taking the seams you marked and unfolding the UV’s through a mathematical process. This images are from the pelting tool from Hydralab.  There are other pelting/UV unwrap programs out there to make your job easier.  Another great one is the Headus UV Layout.

 After all this, the good news is you get to paint canvas like a traditional artist and wrap it on a 3D Model, like the modern artist that you are.

-Juan

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