3D Animation by Mike James
Since one of the most influential drummers in my life was Buddy Rich, this seemed like an obvious project to do. It’s a scale model of the “Radio King” drums that Buddy played for the last years of his life.
This animation includes some camera movement up and down, for a natural perspective. (around 2001)
I’ve been an aviation fan, pilot, and skydiver, for many years, and have designed several radio-controlled model aircraft. The designs in these movies were intended to be all-composite. (molded fiberglass, carbon, and Kevlar)
The top animation shows the assembly of the major components, as they fly in, over the drawings. This is a Raytheon Super King Air B200 model at 1/6th scale.
The second animation is a rotating, transparent view of my 1/6th scale Piaggio “Avanti” P180, showing the landing gear retraction sequence. The animation loops.
Ultimately, you’ll see a more aviation-related animations here, because I’ve done a lot of aviation-related design work in a 3D atmosphere. Some “business”, some just fun.
(Molded composite radio-controlled aircraft and UAV design)
The Raytheon Super King Air B200 (2003)
The Piaggio “Avanti” P180 (1997-98)
This page is relatively new. More animations coming.
“Daisy” (1996)
This was my very first attempt (around 1996) at creating a simple character with “inverse kinematics”. The idea came from an animation I saw back in the 1980’s, produced on a Cray computer. Today, we do these on a home PC...
As you can see, “Daisy” is made entirely of cones, aside from her head and her hat. Pretty “klunky”, but it seemed very high-tech at the time.
When I quit programming and started being just a “user”, the fun really began. In those days, we could only render about 1 frame every 15 minutes, so producing a 10-second video at 15 frames per second means 150 frames, or 37 HOURS to render! (Today, we render these in 15 minutes... Ahhh.)
Anyway, this was one of first (and most goofy) animations that a friend of mine and I did, after a few beers. He was very “anxious” about moving, and about the possibility of getting married. His name is “Buzz”, so this animation is called “Buzz’s Indecision”.
Note:
You might want to turn your sound down a bit for this one.
In 1984, while on the road as a musician, I bought a book of gorgeous computer graphics, called “Art and the Computer”, by physicist Melvin Prueitt, PHD. His graphics pointed out something to me about conveying huge amounts of data with images, and were beautiful, regardless. In those days, the kind of images he produced were only possible on powerful machines like NASA’s “Cray” computers. Most of us who had personal computers were using Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, and (pre-Macintosh) Apple computers... Nice, but very limited on the graphics.
I had begun as a hobbyist programmer in the late 1970’s, and longed for some decent graphics on a personal computer. It seemed to be that the only way to produce them would be to do the programming myself, so that’s what I studied in my spare time. I ultimately sold a 3D graphics program (“Terrain 3D”) for the Sinclair QL, to Digital Precision, U.K.. Today, I’d call it a “glorified function plotter”, although it was unique at the time. (customized terrain creation for game designers, achieved by a process I invented for adding formulas together, without having to understand the math, using visual metaphors) An explanation of that is at http://www.mikejamesmedia.com/mj_3d_origins.html
Now, (Thank God) I’m just a “user”, and have left programming behind. So some of my graphic projects have developed into creative outlets, and occasionally, even a little “business”. For those of you who may be interested, I do have several 3D models for sale, as well as a medium-level CAD tutorial CD available on my archive site at http://www.nextcraft.com (called “CAD for Modelers”) Most of the animations here were done at my own pace, and span a period from 1996 until now. None of these are “movies”, per se. They’re all brief (5 to 15 seconds, usually) and many of them are simple 5 or 10-second “loops”. You’ll know them when you see them...
Enjoy, but don’t take them too seriously. - Mike James
All animations are ©Copyright by Mike James - www.mikejamesmedia.com
“Buzz’s Indecision” (1996)
Nancy
“Daisy” ultimately developed into a little more sophisticated model, which I called “Nancy”.
In this (looping) animation, all of her parts fly in from different directions, and away again, so show her overall simplicity.
“Nancy” does contain inverse kinematic connections, but I’ve never done other animations with her, due to time constraints. Maybe someday...