Today we had Dr. Mark Lochrie in to give us a little inspirational talk about ‘the internet of things’. He talked a bit about the team he works with, which is called Media Innovation Studio. He also introduced us to a little electronics DIY kit , called littleBits.

It was a very easy to use kit, with many many possibilities of what you can make with 2 starter kits. Some of us built a remote car, other started a rave show by connecting all of the lights, adding a sound sensor ( ? ) and playing some club music. Graham managed to built a a little keyboard with a speaker and played ‘Jingle bells’ on it, Jacob managed to build a synthesiser and managed to create a club-worthy beat with ups and downs. In conclusion I can say that littleBits brought out talents in each of us that we, or at least I, didn’t expect. In short : littleBits brings out the DJ in all of us.

In regards to my own work, I don’t know how I could use this technology in collaboration with 3D modelling. But I will think about it thoroughly once I get the time for it.

I’m going to start blogging properly, so what I’ve wanted to do for quite some time now is to recreate the BB-8 droid from Star Wars. It is seemingly a simple shape, made from a UV sphere for the bottom and another one cut in half for the top, with a little altering such as extruding and scaling. I think that BB-8’s look is mostly created through its texture. So the mesh is going to be a very simple one, but the texture is going to be the challenging part. Which is good, because I’m confident in my mesh building abilities, but not in my texturing abilities. BB-8 has 3 main colours, which are white, orange and a dark grey. The surface is also panelled. I won’t use the technique with the modifiers that I used for Ship-E, because it created quite a few problems with the texture later on, so what I’ll try this time is to create the panels with a bump map. BB-8 is altogether a little dirty and shows a little wear and tear which I’ll create in Substance Painter later on.