May 2011 – Josh Barnett

So Sporkii and I started playing Minecraft last weekend. Of course I’d seen a ton of videos, screen caps and rave reviews, but I never really understood what drew people to it until I actually gave it a shot. Even still, I find it hard to sum up what exactly makes it so appealing. But clearly, part of the appeal is the blocky visual style. So after playing for a few days I got to thinking, I wonder if I could take an openGL “3d screenshot” and do a render with mental ray. Unfortunately, since it actually runs in Java the openGL capturing software I found couldn’t inject itself into the exe, and the global system monitoring workaround is only available on 32-bit operating systems. C’est la vie.

So after more searching I found this beta Minecraft world to OBJ converter. It’s slow and buggy and crashes with big worlds and has no progress bar to let you know how it’s doing so the only thing you can do is periodically reload the debug.log it poops out, but it got the job done, sort of. Although it came into max with multi/sub-object materials assigned to each axis, there were no bitmaps associated with them, so I had to manually crop and tile the bitmaps and assign UVs. Also, each plane of polygons comes in with its own set of material IDs arranged alphabetically, but if a certain rare material (say, diamond) isn’t on there then it won’t appear in the list, thus there’s practically no correlation between the material IDs on each of the six planes.

In short, it was a huge pain in the ass to connect all the materials and I did an exceptionally sloppy job with it, but I got my damned renders!

Sporkii also drew these two skins for our characters =) So I did a render using my blurry apartment environment map, which looks kinda like paper-craft with the lens blur applied. Also tested out max 2012’s new substance materials a bit, pretty cool stuff.

The majority of my spare visual creative juice has gone into freelance work lately, so I’ve been working on music for fun to keep myself from getting burnt out. This current freelance gig is actually kind of a fun and challenging project and I’ll probably have a fair amount to post when it’s finished, but I think I should refrain in the meantime until the client is satisfied.

So on the music side, I did a quick remix of Busta Rhymes/Janet Jackson’s “What’s it Gonna Be”, just for fun and something I knew Sporkii would like. I think it’s pretty much done.

Since I haven’t had any new artwork to show recently, I thought post something a bit different. Once in awhile Sporkii and I go out for a walk and I bring my 7D along and take dark, blurry macro pictures of nature and decay and apply them to my desktop wallpaper, so here’s a collection of some from the past year.