All with the Blender tag

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(Work in progress) Samples of my WIP for the 175th Anniversary exhibit at the University of Dayton. My initial idea was a corkboard "planning the exhibit" and then the surface of an older desk with scattered photos, but the final idea of a bookshelf is my favorite. Recreating real book spines has been a fun experience and I have a few more books to create to fill out the shelves, along with some additional thematic objects. The regions under the "timeline" and "then|now" text will display TimelineJS and JuxtaposeJS interactives for exhibit patrons to learn about the history of the university. The final interactive will allow patrons to click on the region and zoom in on that component. More updates to come!

Inspired by a digital Advent wreath project at the University of Dayton Libraries for our lobby touchscreen, I decided to try my hand at creating another rendered scene. This project gave the opportunity to learn about geometry nodes in Blender to create the wreaths and decorations, hair particle systems for the stockings, and different shader implementation to create a flame. We did not end up using this render in the display, but I am happy with how it turned out.

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As a small portion of the "Beyond the Byline: Erma Bombeck's Story" exhibit in the University of Dayton Roesch Library, I put together a video that runs on a loop in the space (you can see the video in the intro of the exhibit opening YouTube stream). This project was great for expanding my knowledge of DaVinci Resolve and finding a presentation solution for low-resolution clips.

Based on our first test with the low-resolution clips, displaying them full screen on the TV was not ideal. I had the idea to incorporate a retro TV scene to keep the videos smaller but still visually interesting. I created a composite image in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which was a successful start, but it was a challenge to find freely available photos that checked all of the boxes.

To have control over the scene, I decided to recreate it in Blender. Using a few reference images for a retro-style television and Erma's typewriter, I modeled everything in the scene except for the flower and vase. Through trial and error, I found lighting, HDRI, and rendering settings that produced a reasonably realistic result. The clips in that portion of the video were on the air in different years, so I created individual renders updating the "On Air" sign appropriately.

This was a ton of fun to put together, and I am pretty happy with the final result. After seeing all of the photos in the exhibit, if I were doing it over, I would replace the image above the TV with something else. I also would have modeled something to replace the flower, possibly putting in a few of Erma's books, centering the TV a little more.

The Marian Library at the University of Dayton has various Mary-related statues. This DeGrazia Madonna statue was previously photographed using a rotary table. I used Meshroom, a photogrammetry application, to generate a 3D model based on these images. Although the photos were not ideal for reconstruction, Meshroom created a reasonably clean model. I used Blender to smooth out inaccurate geometry at the head and base and corrected some areas of the texture. The resulting model is imperfect, but it was a successful test of capability based on previously captured photos and free software. See the model at Sketchfab.

A medieval wind/water mill game asset with animation created following a course by 3DTudor in April 2022. This model was added to the Rose Gallery VR Demo as extra eye candy. I did little to "make it my own," as I was pretty happy with the overall plan.