Brian Lo Cicero

Skull 3d Print

Brian — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:07:27 +0000

A 3d print of a skull. I created the original model in ZBrush, exported as STL and printed the sculpture with Shapeways.

SVG Snake

Brian — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:19:39 +0000

I made an SVG snake. Go ahead, inspect that DOM (unless you’re on IE 6-8 that is.) It’s a San Francisco Garter Snake to be exact. Those neon colors are not too far off the real thing actually.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a format that embeds vector images in an XML tree. That means the image paths can be crawled, searched or even animated through standard Web technologies. And because it’s true vector, it can be resized without loss of quality.

It’s awesome but SVG has been held back by lack of IE support. But IE9 jumped on the SVG bandwagon, so it may be a sleeper hit in the coming years as Flash slowly dies off and/or becomes more niche.

See larger version

Temple of Athena Nike

Brian — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:17:21 +0000

A Greek temple based on the Temple of Athena Nike at the Acropolis in Athens, with a quick texture applied. This is an extension of my Ionic Order model.

Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript

Brian — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:11:50 +0000

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around prototypal inheritance in JavaScript. In JavaScript, there are no classes, but something better: prototypes. The essential difference, in my limited understanding, is that you can change the prototype object at runtime and all children inherit that change. Here’s a simple example:
//use Douglas Crockford's method to create objects to abstract the funky prototype syntax if (typeof Object.create !== 'function') { Object.create = function (o) { function F() {} F.prototype = o; return new F(); }; }


//create an object

var father = new Object();

father.eyeColor = "blue";
//create the child object. note the son inherits properties of the father

son = Object.create(father);

alert(son.eyeColor);

//change the parent object and all children inherit the change. son's eye color is now brown. father.eyeColor = "brown"; alert(son.eyeColor);
Why would this be useful? Game programming for one example. Imagine a player reaches a level and all the enemies get harder to beat. Instead of looping through instances to change all their properties, just change the prototype at runtime. Very powerful. More info.

Western Revolver

Brian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:44:15 +0000

A Western revolver/pistol created in Maya, based on the excellent tutorial in Maya Studio Projects, Game Environments and Props

Unity Island

Brian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:42:15 +0000

As an experiment, I created this fully playable island environment using Unity 3d’s terrain creator and scripts from Unity Game Development Essentials book. I created the grass and tree textures in Photoshop.

Enter the island

ZBrush Skull Study

Brian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:38:17 +0000

Ionic Order

Brian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:30:54 +0000

A Greek temple using the Ionic Order

Moravian Stars

Brian — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 23:31:37 +0000

Year of the Tiger

Brian — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 14:28:43 +0000

A drawing for my son, born in the Year of the Tiger. It was drawn in ArtRage.