A Cardboard Landscape

Rice University artists recently constructed an artwork installation that consisted of 20,000 layers of cardboard weighing in at about 8 tons! They die-cut the corrugated sheets into more or less a large topography model. It took 12 days to cut out the curved pieces and 4 days to construct. The structure is even strong enough for a few to stand on it!

…we expanded the potential of constructing landscapes in cardboard to include the viewer’s physical participation. We invited visitor exploration by extending the casual social terrain of the campus into the gallery, transforming it into a traversable rolling playground. On any given day one might discover a group of gallery goers studying, snoozing, climbing, sliding down the rolling terrain, or making-out in one of the darkened recesses below the cardboard surface.

- Rice Artists

Rip Curl Canyon via io9

10,000 B.C.’s Lovable Kitty

Think rendering a few bricks and trees are difficult? Ask the 10,000 B.C. CGI team how hard it was to recreate a 12,000 year old feline. The newly released blockbuster, 10,000 B.C., had a unique challenge of recreating a saber tooth tiger with wet fur. Sounds somewhat easy with all the advances in computer modeling but when there are no saber tooths running around to go look at and when the scene calls for a close up of the tiger and his wet fur, it quickly became a very tough challenge that the CGI team had to step up to.

“Obviously, it’s a lot of trepidation,” Wuttke says, remembering what his team was feeling during early effects planning for the epic action-adventure flick, which opens this weekend. “Whenever you’re talking about fur and close-ups, that instantly raises the bar. But then the fur’s interaction with water—it was majorly obvious that it’d be highly challenging for us to complete this work. But we jumped at the opportunity.”

Follow the link to read the full article and see what hurtles the CGI team had to confront for the film.

Behind the Scenes

Steampunk Workshop

Steampunk Workshop focuses their design on taking everyday objects and modifying them to give them a Victorian/Jules Verne/H.G. Wells kind of feel. Their amazing products make today’s products seem somewhat boring. They have modified everything from LCD monitors to RV’s. Check out the pics and head over to their site to get a full list of their projects.

Steampunk Workshop

Sketchup to Maya

Many students and professionals are beginning to work with Autodesk’s modeler called Maya. It provides alot of flexibility when doing animations and creating objects. Many of the same people also like to use Google’s newly aquired modeler, Sketchup. Getting these two modeling programs to work together can be somewhat stressful at times but giantMONSTER has written and illustrated a step-by-step procedure of exporting a model out of Sketchup and importing it into Maya. It’s a very involved process but the end product is definately worth it.

Sketchup to Maya Tutorial

Leave It to Beever

Anyone with an email address and a grandma that likes to send you the most random of email forwards has probably seen at least one of Julian Beever’s pieces of sidwalk chalk artwork. For the people who don’t, this post is for you. Julian Beever’s sidewalk art is a totally new way of seeing art in perspective. He draws his images in very distorted scales so you are only able to view the work at one specific angle. It also gives bypassers an opportunity to be engaged in the drawing by being able to place themselves in the image. It seems like a simple idea until you see how this guy has to set up the drawing. Search him on youtube to see some videos of his process.

Julian Beever

A Digital Antique

If you’re one of the 10 people that decorates your house with Rococo Revival furniture, this clock is for you. The Digi Clock, made by Thorsten Van Elten, is one such piece of artwork that lets you put your Rococo appetite at bay and still keep it real here in the 21st century. Van Elten also has many other pieces of artwork and furniture available on his site.

Thorsten Van Elten

French Puppetry

This puppet show was blown into larger than life proportions to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne’s death. Lead by French puppeteer/actor troupe Royal De Luxe, the show begins with a “Jules Vernesque” space craft which has crashed into the streets of Nantes, France. The story continues with a parade that follows a puppet girl and elephant through the city. Check out the Village of Nantes’ website to see more images of the entire puppet show.

Ville de Nantes