Rebar Knife

I made this a while ago, but never actually got around to posting it. I was trying to make a “sword” out of a continuous piece of rebar, but the handle ended up melting off in the fire. Oops. So, I flattened the bottom out and punched some holes through with a pointy steel rod, allowing me to carve out and attach a piece of a fallen tree branch to create a handle, which I carved smooth and applied some sort of wood sealant to. While it’s probably the best blade I’ve made so far, it’s sort of a moot point, as it was hastily made out of junk steel.

Mushroom Screws?

Like some sort of stoner, I was playing with a screw sitting on my desk when it occurred to me that they sort of look like mushrooms!

I’m sure I’ve made things that were a bigger waste of time?

Edward James Awesome!

I’ve been in the habit of making my own tee-shirts for a while – over the years, I’ve used iron-on transfers, stippled acrylic fabric paint, and even spray paint, although that didn’t work very well. I’ve been sort of fed up with not being able to make proper stencil shirts, though, so I bought some textile ink at A.C. Moore and, using a thin sheet of plastic, made a proper stenciled tee-shirt.

I used photoshop to make the stencil design; I took a photo of Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama from Battlestar Galactica, cut the photo from the background, used the threshold function to reduce it to a black and white image, gaussian blurred the image to soften some of the lines, and then used the brush to eliminate any white areas within black areas. The last step is sort of important, because all of the black areas were physically removed in the stencil, and thus anything within them would be too. The end result was an image like this:

I printed the image at the size I wanted, traced it onto a sheet of thin, rigid plastic (this, to be exact) with a fine-point sharpie, and then cut out all the black areas with a hobby knife. The resulting stencil:

After making the stencil, I used a small roller (solid rubber, not the kind that holds a lot of ink) to roll the ink through the stencil, onto the shirt. I put a piece of cardboard between the two sides of the shirt to prevent ink from bleeding through from the front to the back, which in hindsight was a pretty damn good idea – I had to over apply ink in some areas, so a ton bled through. The stencil did a remarkably good job of keeping the ink within the lines, though, as you can see in the following picture:

Overall, an epic tee-shirt victory!

capAbility Games on the News!

We’re on the news! It’s only two minutes long, but features consumers from the Albany Center for the Disabled playing our game, Professor Kathleen Ruiz answering questions, description via newscaster, and an awesomely vague one-line quote from me. Damn right I laid out those constraints!

Tex Mechs

Last semester, I took a game development class – our project was a game called Tex Mechs. We used a large rear projection screen (6’ tall, 8’ wide) with a pressure sensitive floor mat and a Wiimote tucked into a more exciting enclosure to create a physically immersive, anime stylized video game. We ran it at the 2008 RPI Game Symposium and took home first place in the competition.

For now, I’m just sort of dumping content related to the project here – a video, a Flickr gallery, and a copy of the paper I wrote describing the rendering techniques I used to create a cel-shaded “anime” look. I’m waiting on some better videos, namely three full runs of the game, and will post them when I get them myself, perhaps along with more technical information.

Tex Mechs Rendering Techniques (PDF)

Tex Mechs Photo Gallery