Category: Events

Posted on

Art Hack Day in Brooklyn

The MAKE blog recently posted a notice of an event being held this weekend–Art Hack Day–that I find very intriguing. I’ve been bandying about an similar idea, in part inspired by the Bravo Channel’s reality TV series Work of Art. The show has the typical “Top XYZ” format of elimination challenges. What strikes me about the show is that their work space looks very much like a hackerspace, and once the artists settle in to the work format, they start producing some extremely intriguing pieces.

In a lot of ways, the artist’s studio and hackerspaces are very similar; indeed, we here at Hive76 have made a former artist’s studio as our fire-retardant-home-away-from-home here at 915 Studios. So with that in mind, we are putting together a similar event to the Art Hack Day. We would like to make it an open build session with recycled materials. Stay tuned for the full details in an upcoming blog post (honestly, I will write it, really, I will).

Posted on

Last Call: Introduction to 3D Rendering with Blender

Rendered My Little Pwnies in Blender.

Last Call for tickets to this class this weekend.

January 28th, 1-6 pm @ Hive76

If you’ve been waiting to get your ticket, now’s the time to do it!

Download or create a 3D model of your choice and the free and open source Blender (v2.61 or later, http://www.blender.org/) and I’ll take you through the process of texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing, and post-processing to make a photo-realistic 3D render.

You’ll learn the ins and outs of the interface in Blender, a professional strength, free and open source program for 3D rendering, animation, modeling, texturing, compositing, and post processing.

For all the details, click here to see the previous post…

Posted on

January Philadelphia Star Trek Meetup Wrap Up

The meetup was great, we had a blast!

We watched “The City on the Edge of Forever“, and then played Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator (with a Star Trek mod) 5 times. We faced many Klingon, Romulan, and Orion ships in battle. Special nod to Captain Johnston, the best captain of the night. Nods to Lieutenant-Commander Kalup, as she was able to warp us out of danger many a time; and to Mr. Williams, for keeping the photon torpedo bays hot and ready to fire.

Our next meetup will be Sunday, February 12th, where we’ll be having a double episode watch (TOS & TNG) and more of Artemis with the Star Trek mod.

I’m going to try and put together a crew for the next meetup, if you’re interested in joining Captain Johnston, Lieutenant Williams, Lieutenant-Commander Kalup, and I (Chief of Communications Toliaferro), please email me at “d.toliaferro@gmail.com”. We really need an engineering officer, and a science officer. Captain, helm and tactical applicants are ok too, because we can rotate people in and out.

Live long, and prosper

Posted on

CLASS: Introduction to 3D Rendering with Blender

January 28th, 1-6 pm @ Hive76

Download or create a 3D model of your choice and the free and open source Blender (v2.61 or later, http://www.blender.org/) and I’ll take you through the process of texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing, and post-processing to make a photo-realistic 3D render.

You’ll learn the ins and outs of the interface in Blender, a professional strength, free and open source program for 3D rendering, animation, modeling, texturing, compositing, and post processing.

The class will be broken up into 3 parts:
Part I: I’ll start from the very basics of learning the interface
Part 2: We’ll all go through texturing and lighting a basic scene together
Part 3: Each person will move on to importing, texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing their own model of choice for the remainder of the class.

Class is limited to 10 people to help ensure you get enough attention.

Prereqs
Hardware: You must bring a computer with Blender v2.61 installed and a 3-button mouse. Any computer that can take Blender v2.61 will work (OS X, Linux, Windows are all fine!), but newer ones will render faster giving you better feedback as you work.
Human: No previous knowledge of Blender is necessary.

Here are a couple links to see some of what you can do in Blender:
rendering:
Soda Cans
Batmobile
OMG Pwnies

Eventually you’ll probably want to do animations and motion tracking (NOT COVERED IN THIS INTRO CLASS):
Motion Tracking on Youtube

Some places to grab legally free 3D models for the class. Smaller file sizes will ensure you will be able to manipulate the interface with zero glitches.
http://grabcad.com/
http://www.blendswap.com/
http://thingiverse.com/
Blender.org

Posted on

Open-Source Photorealism, Blender and the Cycles Rendering Engine

See... rendering is fun!! I downloaded a partially completed batmobile model from Blendswap.com (thanks Xuan!), but it wasn't ready for primetime yet. So I segmented, textured, and lit everything (including the Tron style wheels), before rendering it with Cycles. Everything was done in Blender 2.61 FTW.

Blender continues to be my favorite open-source 3D modeling and rendering software package. It has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of years, moving from a fledgling modeling project to a blockbuster production quality modeling, animation, lighting, rendering, and post-processing toolkit.

It’s snowballing into a truly stunning software package. So, there’s no better time than now to teach you how to use it!

In about two weeks I’ll be offering an Intro Blender interface, rendering, compositing, and video motion tracking class right here at Hive76. I’m looking at a 2-day class January 28th-29th, probably 4 hours each day. The beauty is you don’t need to have any 3D modeling skills… there are a TON of LEGALLY FREE and INSANELY DETAILED 3D models widely available. Pick your favorite model and I’ll help you work with it over 2-days to get you positioning, rendering, texturing, and lighting. Hopefully on day 2 we’ll have enough time to try some basic animations inserted over video recorded from meatspace.

Any questions, come to our weekly Wednesday night open house and see what we’re talking about.

Posted on

Hackathon: PAFA Installation

This coming March, Hive76 and the Hacktory will be teaming up again for another installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Come to Hive76 on January 21st 10AM – 4PM for a build hackathon focusing on this installation! Some of the things we’ll be focusing on include touch-sensitive light chimes inspired by these, a computer vision-based theremin using Sean’s html5 synth, and altering the brightness of lights based on radio frequency interference. We’ll be splitting up in to teams to work on these problems and have some working prototypes by the end of the day. Stay for an hour or six!

See you on the 21st!

Posted on

What the hell is computational cognitive science?

He can count.... on YOU being there!

Glad you asked!! Come to Hive 76 on December 28th to find out!

For our next open house, Hive 76 would like to welcome a very special guest speaker, Josh Abbott!

Josh is a researcher at Berkeley’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab and has graciously accepted a request to come speak at our space. He will be giving an overview of Bayesian probability theory and Marr’s levels of analysis and cite specific examples of how they relate to his work.

If you are at all interested in cognitive science, some theory behind it, or machine learning, I strongly urge you not to miss this! This will be geared towards folks without math backgrounds, and Josh will stick around to answer questions.

Who: Josh Abbott. He has studied bottlenose dolphin vocalizations [pdf]!!

What: Brief lecture on CoCoSci

Where: Hive 76 HQ, 915 Spring Garden, studio 519

When: December 28th, 730PM

Why: Science!!

How much:

Free!!!
Posted on

Creating the “Common”

This came in to my inbox this morning. It sounds very interesting, in line with a lot of our core values, especially considering the history of libraries in Philadelphia. I’m a little disappointed because I can’t get in to that part of the city by the necessary time on a weekday, so I won’t be able to go.

Posted on

Maker Collider Event with NextFab Studio: TUESDAY

Option 1) Lasercut, Laser engrave, and LED-light-up your very own Snowflake
Option 1) Lasercut, Laser engrave, and LED-light-up your very own Snowflake

Join us on TUESDAY, December 20th, 7 pm – Midnight

Meet-and-Make, Hive76 and NextFab Studio Members
@ http://NextFabStudio.com/ @ 3711 Market Street

This “Maker Collider” event will be a great opportunity to make awesome stuff.

We had proposed these projects:
All details are here on the Wiki

After reviewing the projects here and those proposed by NextFab members it sounds like we will be doing some form of the Chess boards, the snowflakes, some robotics, and a bunch of laser-engraving. But what if you don’t like those? Come by anyway and you can rally troops for helping you on your own project(s).

NextFab Studio will have these staff members on hand throughout the event:
Chrinstine : Textile and Industrial Design ( fabric knowledge, product design,cad, sewing )
Ian : Electronics (pcb design/fabrication, coding, wiring, soldering, etc.)
Seth : Mechanical Engineer (handtools, cad, product design)
Brandon : Multi-Media Designer ( 3d printing, graphic design, product design, cinematography, cad)

Anything you want to do, you can do. AWESOME.

Check out all their equipment.

Oh, and there will be food too. Be there at 7 pm!!

To Join in on the Discussion, please join our mailing list