Online Portfolio of Michael Wach

Now that my semester is over, I have a lot more free time to work on all of those long lost projects. I’m basically finished with my website for now, besides going back and uploading older content. So the next project is my dad’s website.

For those of you that don’t know, Wach Gallery is the name of my father’s business. He buys and sells “Fine 19th Century, 20th Century & Contemporary Photography”. Last year I built him a custom tailored PHP and MySQL content management system. Since then, I’ve learned a lot of new things. Now, I plan to take this intermediate site to professional.

The front end mainly Read More...

Here is the results of my digital photography class I took throughout my spring semester of 2008 at UAT. These pictures may not be the best but at least the class was fun. Actually it wasn’t really the class that made it fun, it was really the missions I went on to get photos for our assignments. I shot everything using a Pentax Optio 555. It’s a rather mediocre quality camera. There’s some things that look good from this camera, but I just think the lens is worthless. My buddy has a brand new fancy shmancy cannon with like 10 or somethin megapixels. So I am slightly envious.

The class assignments varied by subject matter. We started with pictures of the school and Read More...

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso…  I’m not going to try to pronounce it. He is more commonly known to you and me as Pablo Picasso, for short. For those of you that may not be familiar with his name, he is one of history’s greatest artists. Before we get into his works, I am going to discuss some of his background. This is my presentation for a spring psychology class at UAT.

Pablo Picasso was born in Spain during the fall of 1881. You may be wondering why he has such a long name. The reason is, his name actually comes from a series of names honoring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso, which was his and father and mother. It was a Read More...

Welcome to website! Unfortunately, I’m still working on getting it all together. Today I soft launched the site. The only thing I need to do now is a few more CSS tweaks and start loading it up with content. Hopefully everything should be finished up by the end of this weekend, so check back soon!

If you are looking for something that isn’t here anymore, check out the archive of my old 2005 website. I didn’t delete anything when I launched the new version of my website, I simply backed up all the old stuff to the following addresses:

http://www.old2006.mikewach.com/
Read More...

Here is an interesting story… I recently moved into a nice neighborhood for a change. Actually, I should say expensive neighborhood. “Ahwatukee” isn’t technically a city (nor is Guadalupe), but the name seems to be catching on for a more upper-class area of southern Phoenix. Ahwatukee is the area south into the mountain overlooking my school on 48th street and Baseline. UAT didn’t exactly end up in the safest area of Phoenix, nor the most dangerous. Regardless, there’s not too many appealing places to live near by. If you can afford the hefty price of an Ahwatukee home, then it is for sure the best option I believe for an out-of-state UAT student, unless you go with the Read More...

During the spring semester of 2007, I took a class titled “3D Texturing & Maya” (DVA223) with instructor Arnaud Ehgner. The final project was to go out and take a picture of an interior and then recreate it as similar as possible in 3d. So my girlfriend at the time was into interior design and suggested that I take my camera to some model / display homes here in Arizona. We looked up some addresses on the internet and then set out for the adventure.

I believe the model home I chose to recreate in 3d was located far, far away from my school, somewhere in Mesa. We walked through a number of homes, some of them looked cool, some not so cool… Towards the end of the trip, I walked into the master bedroom of the home we were in. I Read More...

Bump mapping and displacement mapping are two special techniques for making an object appear to have a rough or irregular surface.

What is bump mapping?
Bump mapping takes a grayscale image and reads the light and dark information to simulate an irregular surface. When you render an object with a bump-mapped material, lighter (whiter) areas of the map appear to be raised, and darker (blacker) areas appear to be lowered. Note that bump mapping does not modify the geometry, only the normals.

The bumps are a simulation created by perturbing face normals before the object is rendered. Therefore, bumps don’t appear on the silhouette of Read More...