Online Portfolio of Michael Wach

The original Sony Walkman was marketed in 1979. It was engineered by Sony for co-chairman Morita so he could listen to opera music on long flights. A few years before this in Germany, Andreas Pavel invented a portable cassette player, the “stereobelt”. Andreas patented the stereobelt in 1978 in numerous other countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan. For years Andreas fought Sony in legal battles and the Walkman brand expanded to other media formats. Discman and MiniDisc players were popular for a couple years until replaced by flash memory and hard drive based players. By 2003, Sony finally closed the case with Andreas Pavel. Sony agreed to compensate 10 million dollars and recognize Andreas Pavel as the original inventor of the Walkman. Pavel agreed to never file any Read More...

“Shake it like a Polaroid picture”… something that is being forgotten by more and more people today. Instant photography was at once considered the wave of the future. Today, digital cameras have been outselling film for a number of years now. You can still purchase a Polaroid camera for around $30 to $40, but don’t count on the film being available for very much longer. Polaroid recently announced that they would discontinue film production and close four U.S. factories.

About 60 years ago, Polaroid was towards the peak of its success. Edwin Land released his original “Land Camera” and instant film that developed in less than a minute. The photographic medium was used by some of the most famous name fine art photographers such as Ansel Adams, David Hockney Read More...

There were a number of problems with the 78 revolutions per minute record. The records only stored about 3 minutes of audio. This required song writers to be ‘a little more economical’ with the length of their track. Many artists realized they could record not only sheet music but also on vinyls as long as they could fit the music in the 3 minute duration. The Starr Piano Company in Indiana shifted gears and changed the music recording industry. Towards the 1920s, the Starr Piano Company founded Gennett Records, after producing a number of recordings under the Starr Records label. Gennett Records saved many of the original and most famous jazz and blues songs onto gramophone records. Gennett wasn’t like other record labels; Gennett would record any artist as long as they paid for the studio time and any other production Read More...

Here are the results of my digital photography class I took throughout the 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 cannon with about 10 mega pixels. So I am slightly envious..

The class assignments varied by subject matter. We started with pictures of the UAT campus and worked our way out to rest of the world. This lead to 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...

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...