I've been listening to some instructional CDs in the car as I drive. These are a few words and phrases that I now know:
konnnichiwa - today [subj.] (hello)
O-genki desu ka? - [obj.] wellnes is ? (how are you?)
genki desu, arigatou - wellness is, thankyou (I'm fine, thanks)
anatawa? - you [subj.] (and you)
watashimo genki desu, arigatou - Me [inc.] wellness is, thankyou (I'm also fine, thankyou)
ohayougozaimasu - morning to bid good (Good morning)
konbanwa - evening [subj.] (good evening)
Moshi Moshi - (phone hello)
Oyasuminasai - (good night)
Sayonara - good bye
Hajimemashite - first time hello (how do you do?)
O-namaewa nan desu ka? - [obj.] name [subj.] what is? (What is your name?)
Watashino namaewa Kyle desu. - Me [pos.] name [obj.] Kyle is. (My name is Kyle)
26 January 2011
19 January 2011
Scene 1 begins
So, I started modeling the first scene of my movie. This evening I put together a room for a scene. I also explored a lot of the new features of blender 2.5. It's really awesome and I'm looking forward to the next stable release with extreme anticipation. Anyway, here's a render of what I've got so far.
Publish Post
12 January 2011
I have begun my 3D animated short ski movie
So I've decided to use Celtx for the development of the project. I've started writing the script (I lost my original rough draft) and it is going well. I'll be using Blender 2.5 until the next big release comes out and hopefully I won't have any bugs and I can continue using 2.6.
I'll pitch the idea to whoever reads this and you can all tell me what you think.
The story is about 3 friends, we'll call them Jim, Tom, and Zane for now. The sun creeps into Jim's room on a cold winter morning. He reluctantly peeks his eyes open and catches the glimmer of snow through the window. He leaps out of bed and can't believe his eyes as he looks out at the new fallen snow. This is going to be a great day for skiing. He scrambles for his cell phone to call his buddies.
Tom is in his room working out, maybe playing guitar, when he gets a call from Jim. "Dude what's up?" he says.
"Have you seen the snow outside?"
"Yeah, talk about some wicked pow!"
"So are you in for skiing today?"
"Well, I've got this tough biochem exam I have to study for."
"So what, this is going to be the best ski day ever!"
"Ok, I'm in, have you called Zane yet?"
Zane is nodding off in front of his computer as his fingers continue to pound out code since the previous evening. He jerks up at the sound of his cell phone. "Dude Yo, like who is this?"
"It's me Jim. Tom and I are totally stoked to go skiing today. Are you in?"
"What time is it?"
"It's 8:00 AM, and if we leave now we'll be the first ones to lay down tracks in the powder."
"I've been coding for like 36 hours yo, eeehhh but I think I got a ski day in me."
"All right, then it's settled. So who's going to drive."
They all think about the cars they drive. Zane drive a little sports car and he can only imagine 3 guys and a bunch of gear stuck in there. Tom parked his Honda on the street and the snow plow has buried it under 3 feet of snow. All that is left is Jim's vehicle.
"I guess we can take the Beast"
A montage ensues of Jim's 1980s Ford Econoline vane, license plate "666 HEL", with no original paint left, studded tires, and a bent antenna. The guys pile their gear into the Beast and head out on there way.
The drive up the canyon is perilous to say the least. There is slipping and sliding and the van crosses back and forth over the rumble strips without the passengers giving the slightest thought to their safety. The symphonic version of 'Sleigh Ride' adds a perky shopping mall feel to the out of control spree up the mountain road. An interior shot of the vehicle shows the friends head banging to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Looking up, there is a plow clearing the road ahead, Jim realizes that he is in the wrong lane heading straight on toward the massive plow. He does his best to get out of the way, but the plow clips his back end and the van goes spinning off the road. They slide down the mountain, pinball off a few trees (Bohemian rhapsody still blaring), and go sailing over a snowbank. Things go into slow motion as the song begins to mellow and the van gracefully lands on a down slope which conveniently spins them into the ski resort parking lot as the final gong sounds.
'Sleigh Ride' resumes as the three dudes ride the lift to the top of the mountain.
"I can't believe we're the first ones on the mountain." says Tom
"Fresh powder and no lift lines; double bonus!" chimes in Zane
Jim isn't paying attention. Journey's "Any way you want it" is blasting through is iPod.
Zane and Tom look at him.
Jim realizes what's going on and shouts "Yeah, go ski day, thing, uh-huh, alright." Pointing the other way he says "Hey look, a seagull."
The others look as Jim blasts off the chair down the hill.
Next is a montage of the three skiing as 'Sleigh Ride' winds down. Jim is up to his waist in powder. Zane is beaming. Tom is carving some great turns. Jim goes of a jump and pulls a 360. Tom hits the same jump and gets a nice front side grab. As the final trumpet squeal of the song bleats out, Zane goes flying haphazardly off the jump like a rag doll and over the horizon and the song ends.
The final shot is a picture of me and my friends in the hospital with Nate Smith and his broken harm.
The End
There are a bunch of inside jokes that I will add to the movie and I hope to make it very light-hearted and silly.
I'll pitch the idea to whoever reads this and you can all tell me what you think.
The story is about 3 friends, we'll call them Jim, Tom, and Zane for now. The sun creeps into Jim's room on a cold winter morning. He reluctantly peeks his eyes open and catches the glimmer of snow through the window. He leaps out of bed and can't believe his eyes as he looks out at the new fallen snow. This is going to be a great day for skiing. He scrambles for his cell phone to call his buddies.
Tom is in his room working out, maybe playing guitar, when he gets a call from Jim. "Dude what's up?" he says.
"Have you seen the snow outside?"
"Yeah, talk about some wicked pow!"
"So are you in for skiing today?"
"Well, I've got this tough biochem exam I have to study for."
"So what, this is going to be the best ski day ever!"
"Ok, I'm in, have you called Zane yet?"
Zane is nodding off in front of his computer as his fingers continue to pound out code since the previous evening. He jerks up at the sound of his cell phone. "Dude Yo, like who is this?"
"It's me Jim. Tom and I are totally stoked to go skiing today. Are you in?"
"What time is it?"
"It's 8:00 AM, and if we leave now we'll be the first ones to lay down tracks in the powder."
"I've been coding for like 36 hours yo, eeehhh but I think I got a ski day in me."
"All right, then it's settled. So who's going to drive."
They all think about the cars they drive. Zane drive a little sports car and he can only imagine 3 guys and a bunch of gear stuck in there. Tom parked his Honda on the street and the snow plow has buried it under 3 feet of snow. All that is left is Jim's vehicle.
"I guess we can take the Beast"
A montage ensues of Jim's 1980s Ford Econoline vane, license plate "666 HEL", with no original paint left, studded tires, and a bent antenna. The guys pile their gear into the Beast and head out on there way.
The drive up the canyon is perilous to say the least. There is slipping and sliding and the van crosses back and forth over the rumble strips without the passengers giving the slightest thought to their safety. The symphonic version of 'Sleigh Ride' adds a perky shopping mall feel to the out of control spree up the mountain road. An interior shot of the vehicle shows the friends head banging to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Looking up, there is a plow clearing the road ahead, Jim realizes that he is in the wrong lane heading straight on toward the massive plow. He does his best to get out of the way, but the plow clips his back end and the van goes spinning off the road. They slide down the mountain, pinball off a few trees (Bohemian rhapsody still blaring), and go sailing over a snowbank. Things go into slow motion as the song begins to mellow and the van gracefully lands on a down slope which conveniently spins them into the ski resort parking lot as the final gong sounds.
'Sleigh Ride' resumes as the three dudes ride the lift to the top of the mountain.
"I can't believe we're the first ones on the mountain." says Tom
"Fresh powder and no lift lines; double bonus!" chimes in Zane
Jim isn't paying attention. Journey's "Any way you want it" is blasting through is iPod.
Zane and Tom look at him.
Jim realizes what's going on and shouts "Yeah, go ski day, thing, uh-huh, alright." Pointing the other way he says "Hey look, a seagull."
The others look as Jim blasts off the chair down the hill.
Next is a montage of the three skiing as 'Sleigh Ride' winds down. Jim is up to his waist in powder. Zane is beaming. Tom is carving some great turns. Jim goes of a jump and pulls a 360. Tom hits the same jump and gets a nice front side grab. As the final trumpet squeal of the song bleats out, Zane goes flying haphazardly off the jump like a rag doll and over the horizon and the song ends.
The final shot is a picture of me and my friends in the hospital with Nate Smith and his broken harm.
The End
There are a bunch of inside jokes that I will add to the movie and I hope to make it very light-hearted and silly.
My knife so far
So here is the quick and dirty of my knife project.
I started out with the following tools: angle grinder, file set, sanding and cutting discs, a good 2.5 lbs. hammer, and a somewhat nicer bernz-o-matic torch. In the fall I went to a scrap yard and picked up a huge chunk of steel to use as an anvil. It cost me about $20 for over 100 lbs. Some guy there also gave me a vice for free that will come in handy. Next, I went by a spring shop, AAA springs in Salt Lake, and got a 36"x1.125" piece of 5160 spring steel. Then I headed out to South Jordan to Interstate Brick and got half a dozen fire bricks for a little under $10.
Eager to get started, I drilled a hole through one of the fire bricks for my torch nozzle to sit in. In the back yard I made a small box out of the bricks with an opening just big enough for my spring to slid into. I fired it up and it took about 15 minutes to see the steel starting to glow. So eager to do something, I started pounding away at the steel to no avail as it quickly cooled. I let it cook for another 15 minutes, but it only ever got to be a faint orange. Nevertheless, I banged the heck out of the end of the spring. I ended up waking up my neighbor who shouted some unpleasantries in my directions.
I learned quickly that I don't have enough heat and I really suck and smithing so I decided to simply grind my first knife from the stock. I traced my design onto the good end of the spring and roughly cut it out with a cutting disc with the angle grinder. This took about 5 minutes followed by about 30 min of rough grinding. Next, I ground the knife blade to roughly the right thickness. I went a little too far in a couple of spots, but this is my first try, so I can accept a few blemishes. Overall, it turned out OK. I started trying to grind down the blade a little more using a sanding disk but found that it was too abrasive and too fast. I decided to avoid further damage and took a file to the blade. I've probably put in about 30 hours of filing on this knife.
A little before Christmas, I picked up a really old drill press from my uncle Scott. I got a set of sanding drums from Harbor Freight and that seemed to work a lot faster and better than filing or grinding. I had a lot more control and it was much slower. The only problem is that the drill press is a bit wobbly and I couldn't get a very straight grind so I will have to do more filing.
I'm about done with the bulk of the grinding. The next step is to make a guard and pommel, but the steel I have is buried under a foot of snow somewhere in the back yard and I can't find it. I'm not sure how to make a guard, but I assume I'll just cut out the shape I want, drill a hole for the tang, file the hole until it is just right, and slide it in to place. I'm going to solder it in place for good measure. For the pommel I'll just cut out two identical pieces to match the bottom of the handle and sandwich them around the tang and grind them flush. I want to put a hole at the bottom of the knife for a rope or lanyard. As for the handle, there are some nice branches from the cherry tree I chopped down last spring that would look great. I'm not sure how I'm going to bind the handle to the tang. Since the knife is a full wide tang, I guess I can hollow out the middle of the tang (see picture) so that the handle can attach to itself.
Some of the things I've designed into the knife are:
Here are pictures:
I started out with the following tools: angle grinder, file set, sanding and cutting discs, a good 2.5 lbs. hammer, and a somewhat nicer bernz-o-matic torch. In the fall I went to a scrap yard and picked up a huge chunk of steel to use as an anvil. It cost me about $20 for over 100 lbs. Some guy there also gave me a vice for free that will come in handy. Next, I went by a spring shop, AAA springs in Salt Lake, and got a 36"x1.125" piece of 5160 spring steel. Then I headed out to South Jordan to Interstate Brick and got half a dozen fire bricks for a little under $10.
Eager to get started, I drilled a hole through one of the fire bricks for my torch nozzle to sit in. In the back yard I made a small box out of the bricks with an opening just big enough for my spring to slid into. I fired it up and it took about 15 minutes to see the steel starting to glow. So eager to do something, I started pounding away at the steel to no avail as it quickly cooled. I let it cook for another 15 minutes, but it only ever got to be a faint orange. Nevertheless, I banged the heck out of the end of the spring. I ended up waking up my neighbor who shouted some unpleasantries in my directions.
I learned quickly that I don't have enough heat and I really suck and smithing so I decided to simply grind my first knife from the stock. I traced my design onto the good end of the spring and roughly cut it out with a cutting disc with the angle grinder. This took about 5 minutes followed by about 30 min of rough grinding. Next, I ground the knife blade to roughly the right thickness. I went a little too far in a couple of spots, but this is my first try, so I can accept a few blemishes. Overall, it turned out OK. I started trying to grind down the blade a little more using a sanding disk but found that it was too abrasive and too fast. I decided to avoid further damage and took a file to the blade. I've probably put in about 30 hours of filing on this knife.
A little before Christmas, I picked up a really old drill press from my uncle Scott. I got a set of sanding drums from Harbor Freight and that seemed to work a lot faster and better than filing or grinding. I had a lot more control and it was much slower. The only problem is that the drill press is a bit wobbly and I couldn't get a very straight grind so I will have to do more filing.
I'm about done with the bulk of the grinding. The next step is to make a guard and pommel, but the steel I have is buried under a foot of snow somewhere in the back yard and I can't find it. I'm not sure how to make a guard, but I assume I'll just cut out the shape I want, drill a hole for the tang, file the hole until it is just right, and slide it in to place. I'm going to solder it in place for good measure. For the pommel I'll just cut out two identical pieces to match the bottom of the handle and sandwich them around the tang and grind them flush. I want to put a hole at the bottom of the knife for a rope or lanyard. As for the handle, there are some nice branches from the cherry tree I chopped down last spring that would look great. I'm not sure how I'm going to bind the handle to the tang. Since the knife is a full wide tang, I guess I can hollow out the middle of the tang (see picture) so that the handle can attach to itself.
Some of the things I've designed into the knife are:
- long axis of the knife from the tip to the center of the pommel is weighted exactly down the middle so if I have to smash nuts with the pommel or something, the weight of the knife is directly over it.
- Where the blade and guard meet there is a small notch that can serve as a wire stripper/cutter
- Scandinavian grind for long edge life and easy sharpening
- Slightly curved handle for ergonomics, but not much.
- Knife dimensions are 4.25" blade, 4" handle, tang is .5cm thick, and the blade is just thinner than that at its thickest
Here are pictures:
07 January 2011
2011 - A new year and some goals
Well, this blog is intended to be the documentation for all the weird projects and DIY inventions that I undertake. I haven't gotten around to publishing anything yet and this doesn't look very good, but that's one of the projects. Anyway, here are the projects that I intend to start, continue, or complete in 2011:
- Survival knife - I've got a good start on my first one, after I finish it, I'll try actually forging one.
- Skiing animated short film - A little project I started a couple years ago that didn't get off the ground. I've got the script and storyboard on some scratch paper somewhere. I'm hoping for the release of Blender 2.6 to come out before I finish it.
- Auto glock - no, not a gun, but a robotic glockenspiel. I have all the parts and tools I need and luckily painstakingly cut each bar and tuned it a few years ago. It's just sitting collecting dust.
- ROV sea turtle - I at least want to get this started. A robotic submarine sea turtle capable of 100m depths. A fusion of a realistic looking sea turtle model and a fully featured ROV on the cheap.
- Theremin?
If I can get this list done this year, I win a million points.
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