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 and Robert Rauschenberg. Polaroid even seemed to have won the battle over the instant camera market with Kodak towards the late 1970s. Unfortunately, as time went by, new technologies appeared on the market. Polaroid was late trying to keep up with the technology, and suffered many losses. In 2001, Polaroid filed bankruptcy and is now owned by Petters Group Worldwide. Today they manufacture digital cameras and video equipment. Below is a quick slide show presentation depicting the history of instant photography.

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 going to be constructed of Flash. All of the flash applications are going to interact with the database he already has. So in other words, a majority of the core functionality is still usable, because I built it well last year. There’s just a few tweaks and additions I’d like to take care of along with cleaning up the code. Since I plan on doing this professionally, I sketched up some ideas in my notebook and then applied them in Photoshop. Some of the results can be found in the image gallery above.

Gramophone, or vinyl records were originally inscribed acoustically using a horn connected to a diaphragm which vibrated a wax cutting stylus. The level of sensitivity and range of frequencies recorded were very poor. Many musical instruments were nearly impossible to record with this method. During the 1920s, new electrical technologies emerged which allowed sound capturing with microphones. The signal could then be amplified with vacuum tubes and sent to an electromagnetic recording head. Electrical recordings produced much higher quality audio than the acoustic method, and more musical instrument frequencies could be distinguished.

One of the first and most famous singers to embrace the electrical recording method was Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby. For both the electrical and acoustic methods of recording, the artists needed to perform perfectly throughout the duration of the track. There was no way to rewind or edit the vinyls once they were recorded. Later in the 1940s, a new form of recording appeared, magnetic tape recording. Bing was also one of the first introduced to the new method of recording. Using magnetic tapes allowed the artist to edit and compile together their best tracks, and therefor encouraged more individuals to produce their own recordings.

Around the time magnetic tape recording was introduced, two other innovations began to surface. A new type of record, the LP, or Long Play format, which enabled higher quality stereo sound to be recorded for a much longer duration. Also introduced was FM radio, which has a higher fidelity than AM radio. These new, higher quality formats combined with multitrack editing allowed an individual to record and master entire compositions all on their own.

Multitrack recording made the one-man band practical. Originally audio needed to be recorded perfectly for the entire duration of the recording. With new electronic recording tools in hand, one could go back and correct any areas with mistakes. Now it is possible to produce any type of musical waveform, including those not produced by any real instrument. The only drawback is that the product may not sound as authentic as one recorded with a real band. It can be challenging to blend a multitrack recording and create a harmony with each track. This is becoming less difficult everyday with the constant technological advancements and spread of audio mastering knowledge.

I feel that the triumph of amateurs will be the completion of the music industry. As previously described, the music industry began with non-editable band recordings. New technology emerged year after year and dramatically changed the recording process. Today, anyone can obtain the necessary tools for recording, editing, and mastering their own audio. No longer are record companies required to produce your own music. Therefor the creation and distribution of recordings can be completely determined by the artist. This also allows the artist to market / advertise the work as he or she wishes. As for professional, commercial recordings, I feel that there will always be a business. Not everyone will want to take the time to produce their own recordings. Professional recording studios will always be able to provide their services for whatever fee, just as one would pay for any other job they’d rather someone else do. As with the rest of music history, technological advancements simply provide more opportunities to broader groups of people.

The information above was summarized from the official National Public Radio website and various Wikipedia entries.

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 landscapes, portraits, action shots and macros. I think I might have missed the macro assignment, where the teacher actually invited all of the students to her place on the weekend to take pictures of the flowers in her downtown Phoenix apartment complex.

Taking part in this course undoubtedly seemed to spark some interest from my father, a currently increasingly popular photographer. Around the middle of the class, in February, I went home to Cleveland to get my teeth checked out by a special dentist. I got to hang out with the family for a couple days and see one or two friends from the long lost past. By the second day we were already on a photography field trip to Lake Erie. I got to learn direct from one of mankind’s greatest photographers.

I think my most favorite photo from the entire 4 month semester would be the one I took with my Dad on that trip. He took a picture of me while I was prepping my camera for the shot. Shortly after, we went home to where it was warm, and checked out our results on the computer. I touched up a few things and he some prints on his high tech super big Epson printer. Not long after my flight back to Phoenix, I received a package from my Dad with the photo I took, already matted and framed. He also included a few of my favorites which he previously shot on his Sony camera. Now they are all on display in my apartment, which seems to be a common thing to do in my family- every one of our homes seem to display his work. I’m not going to lie, it gets a lot guests attention, and makes my apartment that much more pimpin’…

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 Spanish custom when he was born to do this with their names. His father’s name was actually Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco, and his mother’s name was María Picasso y López. They were a middle class family. His father, Ruiz, was a painter that specialized naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. He was also a professor of art at the School of Crafts. Young Picasso showed a passion and skill for drawing at an early age. According to his mother, Picasso’s very first words were “Piz, Piz”, which is short for “Lapiz”, the Spanish word for “pencil”. From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. On one occasion the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son’s technique, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.

Picasso’s father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, one of the greatest art schools in the country. In 1897, Picasso was 16, and set off for the first time on his own. Picasso had many difficulties accepting formal instruction, which led him to stop attending class soon after enrollment. In 1900, Picasso made a trip to the art capital of Europe, also known as Paris. There he made friends with Max Jacob, who helped him learn the language and later shared an apartment with. Max slept at night, while Picasso slept during the day- and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work had to be burned to keep the small apartment room warm. In 1904, in the middle of a storm, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a Bohemian artist who later became his mistress. She appears in many of his Rose period paintings. This was not the first or last in the love life of Pablo Picasso. After acquiring some fame and fortune, Picasso left her for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many of his works. In all honesty, there were hundreds of women that had fallen in love with Picasso. All of which could have sworn they were his one and only. Picasso loved the ladies, and the ladies loved him. There were so many in his life, we don’t have time to cover it here.

During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso’s artistic style did not fit the Nazi views of art, so he wasn’t allowed to show his work during this time. He retreated to his studio, continuing to paint anyway. Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French resistance. One of his most famous paintings, titled “Guernica”, depicting the German bombing of Guernica.

Picasso died of a heart attack in 1973. He lived to be 91 years old. His final words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore”. The last quote in the presentation I found interesting, because obviously Picasso wasn’t around for Adobe CS3. I would have loved to seen his take on modern day digital art. Picasso is inspiration to try and make something out of it.

Below are the slides from my presentation:

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/
http://www.old2005.mikewach.com/

Anyway, being a nice neighborhood and all, theres more peace and quiet. At least there was until somebody desperate to lease out some more apartments decided it was ok to a group of unemployed college drop outs and flunky high school friends move into the neighborhood. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for some violence, police reports, and eventually evictions to take place. During the squables, one very fed up roommate kicked in this 52″ standard definition projection tv screen. Since everyone was evicted, they all moved whatever they could claim to alternative homes. Not one of them brought this tv with them because there seemed to be no hope for it. A few friends tried fixing it but none had the brains to make it happen. Here is where I came into play.

With the owner’s permission, we went over to the completely trashed neighbor’s x-apartment and dragged the tv over to my place. There I began with removing all the screws on the cardboard shield. Next I removed the screws going all the way around the back of the tv. Now I could remove the large mirror the image reflects off of. I put that to the side and continued my mission. The only thing wrong with the tv was the metal frame that holds the screen was bent in. There are four metal braces that are screwed down to the chassis of the tv. I gradually unscrewed one at a time, bending them back and replacing them. This only took about 20 minutes. Once I was finished, I dusted out most of the tv and put the back side / mirror back on. I screwed in the cardboard piece, rolled it into my bedroom, and sat back to enjoy my second big screen tv Too bad it’s not HD like the one in the living room!

The tv has an amazing sound system built right into it. There’s actually a sub woofer that goes along with the tv, but that had a broken RCA connection. This didn’t stop me. I picked that up too and disassembled it a few days after fixing the tv. I desoldered the old RCA input and replaced it with my own purchased from radioshack. Needless to say, my down stairs neighbors are very disappointed that it works just like new. I somehow acquired a near thousand dollars entertainment center for free. Not a bad deal if you ask me! I took some photos while I worked on the tv, in case any one is in a similar situation as I was and would like a little guidance. You can also feel free to shoot me an email about it and I’d be glad to try and help you out. It’s definitely worth it.

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 was almost immediately certain that this room was going to be the one I render, and so it was. I took pictures of everything possible- different views of the bed, close-ups of the fabrics, walls, furniture, etc… These would make for a much better result than using procedural textures or somebody else’s off of the internet. I like to keep all of my work 100% original, and this way I had my own high resolution images ready to create textures out of.

I loaded the images into Photoshop one by one and created seamless textures for all of the walls and fabrics using the Offset Filter. For those of you that may be unfamiliar with this filter, it simply offsets your photo by whatever setting and wraps the remainder around to the opposite side of the canvas. This is a pretty standard procedure in the 3d world.

Unlike every other student in the class, I was using Blender 3D instead of Maya. I knew how to do the exact same thing in Maya, but preferred Blender because I a much more comfortable with the user interface and workflow. This project would also be a great demonstration of the power of Blender. All of the renders were exported via the internal plugin to YAFRay, what I think of as the equivalent to Maya’s MentalRay. Everything was modeled and rendered on a 2.6ghz intel core 2 duo machine with 512mb of ram and of course, linux. Draft renders took on average about 10 minutes to produce, and typically were way too noisy or distorted to use for anything. The final render took all night, I think about 10 - 12 hours to be more specific. This wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, considering the finals week deadlines and the fact that I also needed to use my computer for other final projects at the time too…

Needless to say, I made it through the class successfully, the teacher loved the results and requested that I join him and a team of other animation students over the summer. I would have if there wasn’t so many other projects I was in demand for, and perhaps if I had a car at the time to attend the meetings with.

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 bump-mapped objects. Bump mapping is useful for adding detail to an object without increasing the poly count.

What is displacement mapping?
Displacement mapping is very similar to bump mapping, where a two dimensional image’s grayscale information is used to change the appearance of a three dimensional object. Lighter tones create raised bumps and darker tones create lowered indentations. Unlike bump mapping, which only affects the object’s texture, displacement maps affect the object’s geometry, forming bumps and indentations according to the displacement map’s properties. These deformed models are rendered exactly the same as without a displacement map, therefore casting shadows and acting the exact same as if you manually displaced the model in Edit mode. In order to create a smooth, realistic displacement effect, the mesh needs an extremely large amount of faces. This high resolution object can be very demanding to your computer’s resources, but if used correctly, the photo-realistic render will be worth it. As computers are becoming more and more powerful, displacement mapping may soon be able to render at speeds necessary for a reasonable game engine. However, the current technology does not meet the heavy processing requirement.

Before you start
Both techniques are very fast and easy to do in Blender, even if you are new to Blender’s texturing tools. Please note that displacement maps are not displayed in the 3D view port. Bump maps can display a basic preview with shading [Shift+Z] turned on.

Bump mapping in Blender
For this tutorial I will use one of Blender’s many generated textures, “Musgrave”. Feel free to pick another type, or even use your own image! Begin by loading Blender and creating a new object. I used the popular “Suzanne” (monkey) model for this demonstration. Next create a new material in the Material Shading Panel [F5], and add a new texture. Now switch to the Texturing Panel [F6], where we will create the bump map. From the “Texture Type” box, select “Musgrave”. I left the default settings alone, but you may choose to play around with them. You can also add a ramp-shader here if you are planning on adding unique colors to the texture.

Next we need to configure the most important settings for the bump map. These controls are located back in the Material Shading Panel [F5] under the “Map To” tab. You may choose to disable the texture’s color (Col) when modifying your bump or displacement maps. This can sometimes give you a better idea of what’s going on with each setting.

To enable bump mapping, press the normal (Nor) button. You can adjust the bumpiness with the slider button labeled “Nor”.

Use bump maps when you want to take the smoothness off a surface, or to create an embossed look. Keep in mind, however, that the depth effect of a bump map is limited to the normal (Nor) slider.

Displacement mapping in Blender
The way you create a displacement map is very similar to the way you create a bump map. The only difference is that you must enable the displacement (Disp) button instead. You may mix the Nor effects with the Disp effects according to your desired result. The displacement slider creates smoother results because the vertices only move outward. This may be useful for creating a unique landscape, for example. The normal (Nor) slider creates a more jagged effect, which may be useful for creating a gravel like surface, for example. When using displacement maps, you will generally attain better results with a high resolution object. Typically you can increase the resolution of your object in Edit mode using the Subdivide tool. Please note that the displacement map tool does not subdivide your mesh for you, it only displaces it. Another way to increase your object’s resolution is to apply a Subsurf modifier. There are two methods for subsurfing your object- Catmull-Clark, for smoother results, or Simple Subdiv, for maintaining the objects structure. Each method can be very processor demanding, depending on how many polygons are created.

Conclusion
Overall, bump mapping and displacement mapping are very handy tools if you know how to use them. Maps that shade between white and black generally work better than maps with hard edges. I highly recommend playing around with the settings and rendering your results to help deepen your understanding of each effect, just remember to be patient when dealing with high resolution geometry.

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