Rebuilding a Table
Last year I accomplished a personal goal of mine: build a nice dining room table. It was the culmination of a ton of projects I’ve done over the years, and this showcased a lot of skills I’ve picked up in 4 or so years of woodworking.
Playing Every Extreme Sports Game
I decided it would be fun to play through all of the extreme sports games I could get a hold of. There are a ton of these games, and I haven’t played a lot of them in many years.
My favorite part is the very stupid Game Boy Color emulator experience that I spent too much time making 😅
Based on the spreadsheet I started, this might turn into 11 or 12 episodes. It has been really fun to stream on Twitch, and I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how to edit it down for YouTube.
HONK® Deluxe
Earlier this week I started modeling a megaphone for fun, just to see how it would turn out. I had made a similar megaphone many years ago when I was 3D printing little toys, but I wanted to make an even nicer one.
The megaphone was turning out pretty cool and I thought it would be fun to animate it floating or doing something. I added the HONK® branding and thought maybe it should be an extremely loud goose honk?
Well that sent me on another rabbit hole trying to sound design a very large sounding honk to put in here. This is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever made but I had a lot of fun making it.
GLOBO
A couple of weeks ago I threw a party that was themed around this fictional company I’ve been doodling for years. The party was a “shareholder summit” where everyone was employee.
The idea for this animated thing was to create something GLOBO branded play on my TV during the party. In the end I was so busy I completely forgot to turn it on 🙃
One of my favorite music videos of all time is the DVNO video from Justice. Everything in this video is incredible and I wanted to try making something similar.
The actual blender file is pretty basic – but I am pretty happy I figured out how to do the huge X glares on everything. All of the fun pixelation and VHS noise was all done in After Effects.
I just want to use my garage
One of the main things I was looking forward to in moving back to Minnesota was finally getting a dedicated garage for woodworking. In Seattle, I was trying my best to make things work in half of a basement with uneven floors and no room for actual tools.
But as it turns out the second garage on our house was in worse shape than expected. I knew I would have to insulate it, but I didn’t realize I would also have to replace the roof, get a bunch of electrical work done, and spiral into a project that has taken a year and a half to complete.
This shop has been impossible to heat in the winter, or it’s been overwhelmingly hot in the summer. I’ve had a couple months in the spring & fall where it’s perfect in there – but that’s not good enough.
Read MoreA place to call home
I’ve owned stublag.com for 20 years. Early on I just wrote dumb stories about pb&j big macs – but for many years this site just sat dormant as a poorly maintained portfolio.
Throughout the 2010s I lived (but mostly lurked) on different social media sites, but still felt like I didn’t have a good place to share things. Either something was never “finished” enough to be in a portfolio, or it was a throw away idea that wouldn’t “do well” on social media. The end result was that I just never really posted anything.
Over the last couple years I’ve had a great time on Mastodon, but I realized I needed a more permanent home for all of this stuff.
If there’s one thing I learned in 6 years of running doodle.zone, is that the only way to keep this up is to make it as simple as possible. This blog is about as basic as it gets.
This is all to say that this site is not a traditional portfolio. It’s more a journal of everything I’m making or excited to talk about. I needed this for me, and if other people stop by that’s great too.
👋
Peppo’s
I’ve been slowly working on animating a short thing with this Peppo’s delivery driver. I took the Honda Civic I made years ago and started rebuilding it so that I can rig & animate it more effectively.
The fun and weird challenge with this is making a giant, cylindrical city block to animate this on. I still need to go through and finish adding some details + texture everything, but I’m liking how this is turning out so far.
2023 Recap
A followup to the recap video I made in 2022. Realizing that all of this stuff is hiding away in these hour long YouTube videos made me want to reboot this blog.
City Blocks
That third one is my favorite of the bunch. Check this out: Marty Crownover modeled & animated rubik’s traffic and it turned out amazing.
Wacky Bus
Back in June I started working with Tony & Kyle of Mostly Bits on a game for the Playdate. They had the idea to make a little game where you drive a bus that changes shape.
The thing I wanted to figure out was how to actually model and animate all of this in Blender, and then export a bunch of sprites to use on the Playdate. I started by modeling everything and then making materials for the black & white. It also helped that I had already made a lot other vehicles and props to drop in there.
This has worked surprisingly well, and it’s been really fun to see the animated pieces working on a Playdate.
My favorite thing so far has been this character I drew for the “administrator” of the Wacky Transit Authority. He hates Wacky Bus so much.
We’re trying to put together a playable demo right now, so hopefully I’ll have something to share very soon here 🚌💨
Visualizing Furniture
The follow up to Power Carving a Wave did not do as well 😄. This video ended up being extremely niche – not a lot of woodworkers use Blender – but I still think it’s pretty cool.
Wave
My first foray into becoming a woodworking youtuber was this video about powercarving a wave. This ended up doing way better than I expected, which was super fun.