Meet Tracy Ray at RenderFarm.NL

As you all know by now probably one of the new companies I'm setting up is a commercial Render Farm. This new company is called RenderFarm.NL and it has a new face. She is called Tracy Ray. Tracy is in charge of all our render cows that are at your immediate disposal. I'm still working hard on the new website but the render farm is already operational, so do contact me (or Tracy) if you have a deadline and need some frames rendered. We support a lot of software already and are always open for new things. Even custom setups are possible. If you know people that are in the media / content creation or 3D animation business then please point them to us. Our contact details are on the website at http://www.renderfarm.nl

Let us know when you have a render job. You can e-mail me at tracy@renderfarm.nl for a quote.

Makerbot Tractor 360 degrees animation

And here is a 360 degrees view of the 3D model of the Makerbot tractor as I promised. I hope it will help someone to do a better 3D print from this :)

Makerbot 3D Tractor Puzzle

Hi, I'm currently printing parts on my 3D printer for a tractor. The original design is my Makerbot, but I could not find any construction howto. Besides that I'm currently working on a 3D scene for my virtual render farm and I wanted a tractor in that scene as well and I though I would be fun to use the same one. So I started importing all the different parts from STL into Cinema 4D and layed them out and first of all gave them  some material to be able to identify them better.

Then I started building the thing together. I noticed right away that not everything is a tight fit by the way, but I guess a bit of glue can fix that on the plastic model eventually. For reference I used some pictures I found on the internet from other people that build it. Here is an in between render where I already assembled some sub components like the engine block, chassis, hood, and wheels. The big parts are quite logical, but there also are a lot of small parts where I really struggled where they should go.

In the end I even had 3 surplus parts. I really have no idea where they should go and everything looks alright to me :) In the picture you see the finished model. All in all it took me a Saturday evening to put it together. Printing the parts takes a lot longer, but at least now I know how much parts to print and also what colors and where they should go. I will make little 360 degree animation of the whole thing so other people might benefit from it. And if anyone does have a howto with clear instructions feel free to post the link here. OK back to work now :)

Datacenter Pyramid Animation

A little animation I made for a customer to show the management what happens with their ICT infrastructure if they don't put fire surpression in the power distribution are of their data center. The animation was made in Cinema 4D, the fire was done with Turbulence FD, I used a soft body dynamics for the rest. The Animation was rendered on the RenderFarm.NL render farm.

NewTek LightWave 1.6 now on RenderFarm.NL

From today RenderFarm.NL also supports NewTek's LightWave version 1.6. So If you use this 3D application and you need affordable render capacity for your 3D animations you can contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl. I also did some minor updates on the RenderFarm.nl website that you can find on http://www.renderfarm.nl

Biz2Be 3D Logo and Under Construction Page

For a friend who is starting a new company I'm currently doing some 3D work. First of all another design company made a new logo for him in 2D. I got the vector file from him and we made some adjustments to the bottom text and then I made this 3D logo for him. I think it turned out quite nice. Then he asked me to make an 'under construction' page for him to put the logo online while he is working on his website. I though let's make something nice. I rigged the little character to take this position and added some nice contruction elements to make a complete 3D scene out of it. You can view the full version by clicking on the picture or visiting his website http://www.biz2be.nl (as long as it is not done yet). I hope you like it. And do contact me if you have a job like this :)

Van Osenbruggen Productions Blog

Since I want to differentiate more between my different activities and the fact that I'll start even more in the future (more information will follow), I just started a new Blog for my 3D and Design activities that I do under the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions'. So if you are interested in these activities do follow me on those other pages. I just started a new Facebook page as well and opened a new Twitter account that I will use for this in the future. You can find everything here:

• Website -> http://www.osenbruggen.nl
• Blog -> http://vanosenbruggen.blogspot.com
• Facebook -> http://www.facebook.com/Osenbruggen
• Twitter -> http://www.twitter.com/vOsenbruggen

 I had to be creative here and there with login names and URLs since some were already taken. I hope you will follow my 3D work in the future as well. Thanks! I will keep on posting the Synth.nl videos of course on here as well.

Wooden Pinball Animation

And another animation I did in Cinema 4D. This is an old Wooden Pinball machine that kids used to play with made from just some wood and nails. Everything is calculated by the physics engine of Cinema 4D and rendered with the new Physical Render engine including the motion blur.

Stair Balls Animation

I recently did this animation in Cinema 4D. A lot of balls bouncing down some stairs. Everything is calculated by the physics engine of Cinema 4D and rendered with the new Physical Render engine including the motion blur.

New Osenbruggen Productions Webdesign

The last few days I did a lot of work updating my Osenbruggen Productions website. I redid the header with a background image that I made in Vue 10. So it is not a photograph, but a computer rendered image. The rest was done in Cinema 4D. I also did a lot of work on the menus so now it is easier to click through all the images and animations on the website. I'm still looking for some nice jobs for 3D animations work by the way ;) I hope you like the new design. You can find the website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl

Space Invaders Project (Part 1)

Last weekend I was playing Space Invaders on my Atari 5200 and I thought: Wouldn't it be fun to model these Space Invaders characters in Cinema 4D. So I downloaded some gifs with clear pixel and redraw them in Adobe Illustrator. After that I gave them some depth with the extrude nurbs function in Cinema 4D. This picture I also used Depth of Field to make it a bit more artistic. I hope you like the picture. You can click on it for a larger version of course.

Here is an overview picture of all the models I made so far. Most of them have different poses. I didn't account for this yet with the colors. I need to see how to animate this later, maybe with pose morphs, but we'll see about that. I do plan a little animation with this in the future, but I need to think it out first :) That is why I called this part 1 and I'm sure part 2 will follow when I have a little more time.

And here is one last picture, just for fun purposes with some rows of the same characters, just like in the game. If you never played Space Invaders before go and look it up. It is still one of my favorite game next to Galaga and Galaxians. All of them are so called 'vertical shoot them ups'. I used to be addicted to them. And this brings me to the thought that I should look up the Galaga and Galaxians figures to of course soon. Ah well. It was nice to spend some hours on a rainy Sunday this way. Now back to music again ;)

Dutch Soccer Team Defense Computer Model

I'm no soccer expert at all, but after watching the Dutch national soccer team lose twice this European Championship I came up with this computer model of the Dutch defense. (You can click the picture for a bigger version) I hope they will learn something from this model and I'll gladly share it with the national coach if he is interested ;) OK. back to serious stuff :) Congratulations by the way to the Germans!

3D IC Socket Project

Last week I had to explain to someone what the difference was between the two types of IC sockets that you can buy. Then I wanted to make a picture of them to make it more clear, but I couldn't get a nice image from the camera, so I decided to model them in Cinema 4D. I'm sure they will come in handy somehow in the future. Here is the first type that has round pins on them.

And here is the other type with flat pins. The round pin option is usually a bit more expensive, but they have my preference. They fit better in the holes of the PCB normally and also the pins don't bend so easily. But there is one situation where you would like to use the flat pin type and that is when you HAVE to bend the pins for whatever reason. I needed this recently to make the boot switch for the Amiga 500. There you need to stack two of these on top of each other and bend some pins out. That is impossible to do with the round pin version.

When I was finished building the two I thought: Why not make some variations as well. So that is exactly what I did. I created the most common wide types: DIP40, DIP32 and DIP24 and also I did some smaller versions: DIP16, DIP14 and DIP8. Once you have a base model to work from it is quite easy to adept them of course, but well now they are done and I can use them straight away next time.

And then I did the same for the other type as well. I curious actually if someone would be interested in these models I created. Sometime I buy models from a specialized website myself, but you can also sell your own stuff there. Maybe I should put this on there as well. I made a lot of other models in the time being as well. I'll have to find out how that works and I might just try to earn a little money this way. When you are reading this and you would be interested in these models do let me know off course :)

3D Main Board Project (Part 1)

I'm currently working on a lot of projects at the same time. Some of them take up a lot of time though so it can take a while before I can show you something. This is a project I did a while ago to learn a bit more about the new physical render engine in Cinema 4D and especially the Depth of Field function. I used a free model of a Main Board and added a CPU and some DIMM memory modules and then tried to find some nice angles to render. As you can see the image is not sharp everywhere. The focus of the (virtual) camera determines this. In this way the renders look more like actual photographs.

Here is another angle of the same main board a bit more zoomed out. Here you can also see the DIMM memory modules. Everything is based on an actual photograph by they way with the components modeled on top of that picture. The Depth of Field in this image is a lot more subtle but it is still there. Don't forget to click on the pictures for a larger version by the way so you can look at the in more detail.

And here is the last one again from a different angle. I think they worked out quite nice. I'm planning to do an animation of this scene as well in the future, but my render farm is already running full time for a long time on some other animations. I'm really short on CPU now-a-days. For your idea: a render of a sill image like this in high quality already takes up a couple of hours. If you make an animation of lets say 10 second, you need 250 pictures since there are 25 frames in a second. So well do the math :) I hope to show you the new animations soon. I just wanted to share these images with you. I'm sure more will follow from this project in the future.

BIT Project (Part 2)

Last time I showed you the rough model of the building of BIT BV, but now it is time to add detail. Today I spend a couple of hours modeling this security camera. BIT has a lot of these all around the building. I modeled it as close as I could from some picture I took of them. It looks simple I guess, but I can tell you it is a LOT of work to model something like this from scratch in Cinema 4D. Well I'm quite happy with the outcome myself and I'll put them on the building soon. There is a lot of other stuff I also need to model and I'm starting to get an idea of how huge this whole project will be. I hope to update you soon with some more stuff I made.

BIT Project (Part 1)

At the moment I'm working on quite a big and ambitious project. If you have read my biography you will know that music is just a hobby for me and that my main job is actually operating a business ISP company that is running a couple of data centers in The Netherlands. Our current website is Dutch only and needs a big overhaul. I'm currently working with my colleagues on some ideas for the new website. The first this is that is needs to go in a multilingual CMS system. So the good news is that you guys will be actually able to read it later on :)

One thing we want to have on there for sure is a virtual tour through our data centers. The idea is to use real video footage in combination with 3D animated graphics. But before you can create any animation you need to build a model of the whole building. And that is what I'm currently doing. Bart Auceps made a start with the model a while ago in Autodesk 3D studio max and I just completely redid large parts of his model in Cinema 4D and also made some adjustments and additions already to the model. I'm also redid the texturing already.

So now the rough outside of the building is almost done and I need to work on the detail and the interior and after that I need to build the server rooms of the data centers. Most things here I did from the top of my head, but next week I'll take some pictures of details of the building to be able to reproduce that also in the 3D model. I guess this will be project that will take a couple of months for sure. I will post updates on this blog from time to time so you can follow along.

In our house style we use a couple of Dutch bridges as a metaphor for stability and reliability. In the past we took pictures of these bridges and altered them, but for the new website I'm also experimenting with a rendered approach. In the picture on the right you see a bridge that in real life is in Amsterdam, but now it is in my computer. In this way I can get it from any angle and position the water and clouds etc. anywhere I want. I don't know if we will use it yes, but I hope so, since I think it is starting to look quite realistic. If you are interested in the old website and the company you can have a look on http://www.bit.nl/. This website is Dutch only, but I guess you can use Google Translate to read what it is about. There is a lot of text on there btw, but the new site will have more graphical elements and less text for sure. You can click all the pictures for a bigger version btw and every thing you see is computer generated. No actual pictures where used anywhere.