An even keener thing has occurred for The Cube Farm. My image was included in "3D Graphics and Animation" by Mark Giambruno. It's included in the Gallery section I understand (I'm holding out for my promised free copy!). You can order and buy the book on Amazon here.
Here's a shot of the book cover:
A nice surprise today. I normally pick up 3D World Magazine for the inspiration and tutorials. It includes a section called Revelation which has reader images. The magazine includes an accompanying CD with tutorials, demos and more images for the Revelation section that didn't make the magazine.
Well, in Issue #20, the Monster's Inc issue, The Cube Farm is included on the accompanying disk. Not as good as being in print, but not a bad thing all considered.
Here is the magazine cover(click on the image for a larger version):
Here is the image from the CDROM (click on the image for a larger version):
Here's my final cut - 140k at 800x600.
The major differences are:
- Pulled in Depth of Field in the front since the pipe in the upper right was suffering from a bad transition from fuzzed out to sharp
- Changed pipe in lower let since you could see the cube it sprung from and it was out of skew with all other cubes. I thought it was distracting
- Thickened TechnoPod (tm) support cables and angled them a bit so they didn't get lost in all the vertical lines
This started out as an exercise in reusing a single model and in bone chains. I started out with the simple cube and a chain of bones assigned to the tubes, to allow me to flex the tubes using the bones, attaching one to the other by constraining the end bone of a tube to another bone on neighboring cube.
Before long I kind of liked to composition. Add some textures, some Depth of Field, some moody lighting and a TechnoPod (tm) and I kind of like the results. I did play with a background behind the cubes but couldn't come up with anything that didn't seem to take away from the interesting stuff in the image. As always, any feedback is appreciated. Let me know here.
Here was my first cut for public consumption - 140k at 800x600.
