The other day I was typing some food and beverage names into the calendar on my Android phone. After that I pressed the middle circle button but accidentally for too long which brought up the Google voice command thing. It suggested that I give it a voice command … and this command included a beverage name I had just typed into the calendar.
It’s gross and frightening how far tracking has gone. Not even what you type is yours any more. And I wasn’t even using Android’s default calendar, which is Google’s. I never use that for obvious reasons. But still my phone knew what I had typed.
Thankfully I have already ordered a Librem 5 smartphone: The brand new phone in development and is now getting its last finishing touches before mass production. It runs PureOS which is designed to protect you, not exploit you. Unlike Android and iOS which both track what you do and send it to Google.
Google keeps track of every place your phone has been to. Even when you are not using Googles services directly (Maps or Search). Google also saves your search history. You can check them both out at google.com/maps/timeline and myactivity.google.com/myactivity.
There are search engines that do not do that and one of them is DuckDuckGo. It respects privacy and does not track you.
Purism is now finishing up and delivering the very first Librem 5 smartphone: The brand new phone without any ties to Google.
Another smartphone you might be interested in is the one by the /e/ Foundation. They supply un-Googled Android smartphones.
Keaton’s Batmobile is truly a fascinating design. Simple and elegant without any clutter, the vehicle took the movie industry by storm back in -89 and -92. Still to this day I think this design is the best of them all.
This is a re-render of an old model I made way back in 2012. It does have a tad different look than the vehicle in the movies and that’s because it’s based on a 1:35 scale model kit of the car. I fixed some embarrassing topology and made new materials for LuxCoreRender.
The underwater city of Rapture has always fascinated me ever since the game Bioshock was released in 2007. I instantly fell in love with the atmosphere, storytelling, game play, art and sound style and how things are broken and falling apart. The commercials in the game are presented in a very unique way, making a really weird thing look commonplace and natural. Like putting a person on fire by snapping your fingers or sending a pack of bees on somebody. Then Bioshock 2 came with even crazier plot twists, action and wtf-just-happened moments. I still remember the feeling in my gut when I saw Gilbert Alexander in the tank the first time.
This is the Big Sister from Bioshock 2. I had loads of fun modeling this weird and interesting character with her creepy long legs and short torso and unmistakable outfit. Based on some detail renders by Blur studios.
Something simple at first glance but very very good lighting practice.
Lighting is hard. Very hard. So, they say one way of learning it is to re-create photographs and that is what I did with this thing right here.
The white parts of the balls required a little more work to look right. I ended up using a glossy material mixed with a scattering volume… and on top of that a glossy coating layer covering the whole ball.
The fuzzy look of the table carpet was achieved by using a lot of small scale displacement on a plane underneath the carpet and then placing it so the bumps just barely clip through the carpet.
A jade rock material can be rendered with LuxRender by using a volume. It supports three types of volumes each of them with their own strengths and weaknesses. This jade pendant is using a heterogeneous volume, which is slower to render than the other two types, but using it you are able to get some very interesting-looking volumes.
The volume color is created by mixing together several procedural textures. Procedurals being as flexible are they are, you can create just about any look you want.
These are very fun to make because you can just make it up as you go. The only goal I had for this one was something dark and creepy. It is somewhat similar to my previous abstracts, in the way that something is emitting light(energy) and something else wants to absorb it. I figured some insect things with solar catching abilities would do the trick. And maybe these could be some spider like things that could easily traverse this environment.
So, some eight-legged insects with solar catching features. These exist everywhere, right?
It is a wallpaper so some space is left clear on purpose for the icons.
And no, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s abstract. It’s supposed to be weird.
LuxRender supports a strand primitive allowing hair and fur to be rendered with hundreds of thousands of strands. It uses Blender’s hair particle system and creates the strand geometry based on that. You can choose between four different strand types depending on the look you want and four different ways to put color on the strands.
Volumetric scattering is pretty simple to set up in LuxRender. When all materials/objects are inside the volume that makes it super-easy when you can use the scattering volume as the default volume, which makes LuxRender use that volume on all materials/objects.
Keeping track of the face normal is important when picking the exterior or interior volume for a material.
The Landwasserschlepper was an amphibious tractor built by the Germans in the 1940’s. Its purpose was to pull stuff across seas and rivers as well as on land. Indeed a very interesting vehicle design
As cool as the 1940’s design is by itself, I wanted a little comical look to it. The boat hull is way shorter than the original and I wanted some exaggerated tank tracks for no reason at all. Those changes made the scale of things look wrong. Everything is modeled to scale, it’s actually the vehicle that is smaller than it looks.
Piitas blog 