It finally happened, one of the boys came home with Covid. It arrived as an 18 hour headache, and then was gone. None of the rest of us has gotten sick, but the kids are all quarantined, (and so is Fred’s class since at least four other kids and both the teacher and assistant teacher then came down with it). To add insult to injury, the day the boys were supposed to get their first dose of vaccine was the day I gave Fred the test that was positive. On the bright side, it appears the booster shots are effective, and thankfully, because I got one, I don’t have to quarantine without symptoms. It appears the lockdown is about to end as well, and I was able to go back to the Buurtwerkplaats yesterday to onboard our new volunteer.
I started playing with my Tipping Point Sculpture II last night. I wanted to see what it would take to make it collapse, and I shot a couple of videos of it. The sculpture is meant to be dynamic; it’s a connected group of “stones” suspended on a wire staff, but movement is hard to capture in a still image. The posted video ends in a nice collapse too. There was a second video I debated posting where the wire structure tipped over in an interesting way, but the “stones” fell off the pedestal, so I decided not to add that clip to the collection. In the handful of videos I’ve made in the last year, I’ve found it’s a medium I’d like to explore further. Something to keep in mind.
I also created my digital Protoa piece last week. It was fun to work in Rhino in Keyshot again. It had been a while, and I had to break out my old computer because I can’t use my (now ancient) Keyshot license on my new computer. I played with emissive and anisotropic materials which is always entertaining. When I started building the CAD, I did it down and dirty, using simple pipes and gumball scales, but I knew I was cheating, so I redid them using better modeling techniques: building surfaces with sweeps and curve networks. I used my old render pass techniques to add depth, but several of the passes took over twelve hours. I really need to upgrade Keyshot so I can use it on the new machine, until then, the old iMac is the little engine that could.
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