A New Endeavor Under Black Skies

       Alright, so I've been cooking up ideas for electronic guitar effects recently and have been mustering up enough courage to start building my own pedals under the name "BlackSkyCraft".  First and foremost, I'd like to thank BeavisAudioResearch, while the site hasn't been updated in a long time, it has been a huge resource for me.  In addition to his website, I'd like to thank Glass Hero Amplification for his help in understanding just how pedal's work.
      With that having been said, I'd like to create an outline of what this endeavor entails.  My hopes are that anyone who is interested in the process of building guitar effects will gain something from this.  So just like I did with papercraft projects, I'm planning on posting:
(1) Projects that I'm interested in attempting
(2) How I plan on tackling them
(3) Things I've learned along the way
      This is a pretty big undertaking and I hope you all enjoy what you read herein.  In other news, I have not totally abandoned my papercraft projects.  For those of you who have been paying attention you'll notice that I have some loose ends that I need to tie up.  Over the past 2 years I've been rather busy with my work, but have also been slowly learning more and more about 3D modeling.  At some point I'd like to try and make my own models to papercraft, but we'll have to see. As far as I can recall, here are the papercraft projects that I have started and would like to finish up:
(A) Gabranth from Dissidia (Progress is coming along slow, I need to figure out where all my files are...)
and
(B) Bat from FFIII (I started this one in October for Halloween...more than half a year later and I'm still not finished. its a pretty low poly model, but I've been taking it slow.  I purchased a bottle of glue tonight though, so hopefully I can make some progress this weekend)

     Well that's all for now, I'll try and put together more information about the pedals I'm working on later.  I've already started one, but I think I was a bit too ambitious and need to go back to something a bit simpler to begin with...
       

Reaper or Souls challenge

    Alright, pardon the wait, I've been slow at putting this information up, but I wanted to put up some information on the first food competition that Mary and I have entered. I'm a big fan of the Diablo franchise, so of course when I heard about a cooking competition I thought I'd go for it.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/13942445/take-the-eat-game-live-reaper-of-recipes-challenge-4-29-2014

   My approach for this competition was a little backwards, I wanted to come up with a dish that would be representative of the Diablo franchise.  Hindsight is 20/20 and I think I might have fared better if I had chosen a dish and made it more Diablo-esque.
  So in the end I went for a Mapo-Tofu dish and called it "The Arreat Crater". Herein I'll detail the process involved in making my contest creation.

Core of Arreat:

Vegetarian mapo tofu with volcano rice

Ingredients

1 cup of Volcano rice

1 pack of silken extra soft tofu

1 tablespoon of Mapo Tofu sauce (Super lucky brand works)

1 tsp of Szechuan peppercorns

2 scallions

3 large cloves of garlic

½ Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Yields 4 servings

Preparation and Time to cook ~30 minutes

Directions

Preparation:

   1.)    Start cooking the volcano rice, the directions suggest that for 1 cup of rice, you boil 1 ¾ cup of water with a pinch of salt with the 1 cup of rice.  Once it comes to a boil, reduce to simmer and cover for 30 minutes.

   2.)    While the rice is simmering, we can begin the preparation of the other part. Slice the scallions and chop up the garlic cloves. 

   3.)    Slice the tofu into cubes as best as possible.

Cooking the Molten Core:

   4.)    Put olive oil into a non-stick pan and turn the stove onto medium heat.  

   5.)    Add in the scallions and garlic cloves and Szechuan peppercorns, let them cook for a little bit.

   6.)    Once they have browned a little bit, add in the chopped tofu and mix in the Mapo Tofu Sauce. I find it best to slice in the tofu.  The tofu will break up due to its extra soft nature.

   7.)    Let the contents simmer until the contents reach a gentle boil, and then keep on low heat while further preparing the rice.

Preparing the Arreat Crater:

   8.)    By now the rice should be complete.  Pack rice into a small bowl and press it in there firmly to make sure the rice will make a dome shape when flipped over. 

   9.)    Flip the rice over onto the center of a plate.  The easiest way to do this is to put the plate on top of the bowl of rice, and then flip it over, to avoid an awkward rice throwing matter.

  10.) Take the bottom of a glass and press in the middle of the dome of rice to create a dimple or the “Arreat Crater” if you will.

   11.)  Pour the cooked tofu mixture into the center of the dimple and if all is well and done, then congratulations are in order since you’ve just completed the Arreat Crater.

At present, I'm awaiting to hear from EatGameLive as to whether my entry has placed in the contest, but in the meantime if you're interested in checking out other Blizzard related food items check out her blog at the following link....

http://eatgamelive.com/

A Sleeper Awake

It's been a while, Wow! Not a single post from me last year huh?

I've been pretty busy for the past 2 years with some contract work, but hopefully I'll be able to learn to relax and get back to some papercraft.

I think I'll probably post other things that I'm doing up here as well.  I just changed the Blog Name to Lubdar's Craft Blog so we'll see how well that goes....
I've become interested in some various things that I'll post shortly, mostly arts and crafts and a little electronics that I'm trying out.  I'll keep everyone and anyone posted out there...

Chrono Cross: Lynx

Lynx Papercraft

Here is the first model I've ever done without folding, heh all this time I've been a big time folder and always paying attention to the mountain and valley fold indicators.  This is a very straightforward build, only tricky part is his collar.

FF12 Gilgamesh

Ahh yes, how long I've waited. The FF12 process that i'm working with is incredibly labor intensive and takes a long amount of time.  But it was the most feasible way I could get these models.  I've put in maybe a total of 10 hours just to get the model to look like it does now, and I haven't even cleaned the model of intersecting polygons.  In other news, in the next few days I hope to release the Lynx Papercraft, he's been sitting on my desk with just 2 pieces to glue left on his scythe.

But I think for poses I'll go with this pose from the bestiary.

Blades of Legend

A very long post...in other words (May updates on Projects)

First things First...

I don't have internet access at my house, as I sit here trying to install Starcraft II, the wireless in the lobby of my apartment is telling me that I have excellent connectivity, yet I'm transferring 0.0 kbps. That's right 0.0kbps! SO as battlenet tries toe estimate the time left, the hours just continue to increase and increase.  This setback is surely going to be impacted by the inevitable interruption of me not wanting to sit down here for the estimated "46" more hours until all 23 patches are completed.

So I've been left without any of my papercraft supplies except for software.  I've been tinkering with a few models, but at this point with no way to print things It will continue to be a while. Here's an upcoming teaser that I had mentioned a couple posts back regarding the Cecil models from the SNES.  For some reason I haven't figured out how people achieved the poses for certain characters in Dissidia...Mostly I've just been modifying the poses (painstakingly I might add).  I was informed of a way in 3ds where if I export the animation that I might be able to play it and pause it at a given moment, however I hae not figured out how to do such.  Ehh in the meantime I've just been posing as I have.  Here is a shot of the Cecil models I've posed.  

As some of you can tell I was trying to match the DLC poses, I think I got pretty close and as feasible as possible, as some of you know I'm always somewhat aware of intersecting polygons during all phases.  The armpits are the worst especialy when the texture areas in that region are detailed.  I have yet to really mess around with the decimation option when exporting.  I did it with the FF13 models, but those summons are nested so I have no idea how well it could have been working.  The Dissidia models aren't even that high poly, but at some parts it can be a real pain, even reducing the county by 10% while still retaining the aesthetic integrity of the model would be great.

So besides that here are some of the other models that I've been messing around with/working on.

Cuchulainn from FF12

I've moved him into pepakura and the layout is getting close to finished, but due to some of the more fine points of this model I think I'll need to rescale it.  He is an otherwise bloated model and i have him at 600mm, which would be ridiculously large, but the features on his head require some attention, perhaps when I complete the layout I'll scale him down, because we are looking at 50 pages or so.  ALL that is left is laying out the arms and the head.  But I worry too much about the plausibility of myself building him and placing him somewhere, he is far too large.

Multi-armed Gilgamesh

Ahhh how I have been slowly drawing this project out for ages,  I feel that in the end it will be very well worth it.  I'm just never satisfied with how I have him posed.  Posing 2 arms is one thing, but how do I make 8 arms look natural?!?!?  that and the weapons,  I have issues moving too many objects into 3DS to work with, and when I avoid that and work in Sketchup, rotation of objects is a big problem.  And then there is the issue of consistency of weapons source.  I would want the weapons that Gilgamesh holds to be the ones that he uses in the game, however some of these items are ridiculously large, why couldn't he just not be holding any weapons you ask?Don't be preposterous...  Seriously, the size of some of the weapons would have to be scaled down, but then I don't feel that it would have the same presence.

Perhaps what I'll settle with is just using the Dissidia multi-armed model with a lot of katanas.  That seems to be the most likely, however there is the issue of getting the katanas into his hands, since his 6 other hands do not open and close I will have to do a bunch of cleaning work in Sketchup to make it work.

Odin from FF8

I liked this version of Odin alot and would like to build him, but once again my semi neurotic tendencies have locked onto a pose that I like and I have not figured out how to pose him as such.  This sort of model will have to be build with a stand (6 legged horses are not easy to pose).  I'm going for the pose from FFTactics,...

I feel that it is incredibly dynamic and would be great to work with.  However the file is currently being posed as a DAE file, with no named for bones and the hierarchy appears a bit different than I'm used to.

Cecil the SNES Dark Knight and Paladin

As you've seen above...I have posed but just need to clean up the models in sketchup and then get the layout done.  Since these models aren't that tall and not too detailed I hope the layout process will be fairly quick.  These two will probably be on my top priority to get completed quickly but of course I'll build the  Dark Knight first.

Hopefully I can find a suitable printer and get them out in the near future.  I'll be in access of my old printers in about two weeks so that does bode well, however I'll need to get the layouts done ASAP.  I'll try and re-locate the printed out models that I had before the move in order to finish those up. However I say this as Diablo 3 is about to be released, so we'll see how much actually gets done