Wikipedia Puzzle Ball in real 3-D
So I had the idea of building a real 3D model of the Wikipedia logo in the open-source 3D modeling program Blender. Rather than tackle my first 3D task all by my lonesome, I solicited some advice on what direction to take from an internet bulletin board.
Long story short: an artist named Hazard picked up the project and made the whole model...as well as a video tutorial (you'll need DivX to view the movie). There are of course lots of ways to render the model, including texturing the pieces with unicode characters, but here's one he did with a basic shiny globe appearance (click for bigger view):
I look forward to seeing what people do with it, especially in animations! The next big step is to identify a symbol to put on each piece (if the globe is going to spin around, it needs symbols on the back too!). If anyone can help with that, I've sketched up a bit of research on the topic, click it to see:
(As a sidenote, I thought the VfD on the Wikipedia logo article is kind of interesting; I would have thought it would have been in the Wikipedia: namespace or perhaps on Meta-Wiki. But the argument is that Google Logo sets precedent.)
Long story short: an artist named Hazard picked up the project and made the whole model...as well as a video tutorial (you'll need DivX to view the movie). There are of course lots of ways to render the model, including texturing the pieces with unicode characters, but here's one he did with a basic shiny globe appearance (click for bigger view):
I look forward to seeing what people do with it, especially in animations! The next big step is to identify a symbol to put on each piece (if the globe is going to spin around, it needs symbols on the back too!). If anyone can help with that, I've sketched up a bit of research on the topic, click it to see:
(As a sidenote, I thought the VfD on the Wikipedia logo article is kind of interesting; I would have thought it would have been in the Wikipedia: namespace or perhaps on Meta-Wiki. But the argument is that Google Logo sets precedent.)