Jeep

Now its time to do something a little more complex. Something that has several parts to it, rather than just one. Start with some wheels (tires plus hubcaps), vaguely bucket seats, a chassis, and a windscreen. Add a somewhat unusual accessory for the average office worker, a rocket launcher, and you have the perfect start for a jeep. Don't forget some spare ammo. After shooting off one rocket launcher, the next thing you obviously want to do is to do it again. And a few more times. Boom baby!

The tire treads were interesting to make, the hubcaps pretty easy. The seats were again based on cubes, rounded around the edges, with some seams added in. And the body of course is cube-based, but took a lot of steps to make it into a full chassis. And added a small bevel on all the edges so it didn't look quite so blocky. The windscreen is probably a bit too reflective, way to glarey for actual driving in any sort of safe manner. Then again, with a rocket launcher on the back, safety is not exactly a high priority.

You could spend ages on something like this, adding all the details that would make it more realistic. A spare tire on the back, grill on the front, head-lights, tail-lights, steering wheel, rear-view mirrors, fenders, roll-cage, or sorts of stuff. But then who has that sort of time? I settled with adding sights on the launcher.

Chrome

Have you ever seen a car body shop, where they used to fix up those old cars that were in fender benders. They had huge vats of stuff they would dip the fender into, and it would come up looking all shiny. Was like liquid chrome. Bit like Terminator 2. Luckily cars don't often come into contact with liquid nitrogen, or all that shiny chrome would look rather messy shattered into a thousand pieces. Of course, cars don't come in chrome anymore, everything is plastic these days.

As you can see, this is exactly the same as the previous goblet. Except the material has had a single change made to it, adjusting the fresnel value, which varies how diffuse the reflection is. For this one, fresnel is set to zero, which gives it a mirror finish like the chrome on a brand new fender.

I haven't yet tried putting two mirrors facing each other to get that reflecting to infinity look. Or maybe several funhouse mirrors, curvy ones that distort your body to look like some weird clown with large feet and a huge 1-pack (only 5 short). Or maybe a spherical mirror to give that wide-angle lens look. Or sorts of fun ahead.

White Gold

You always see the rich kings and princess eating expensively and drinking wine out of fancy goblets made of gold. We rarely realize that nearly everyone in developed countries lives more lavishly than the richest nobility from hundreds of years ago. Will people living hundreds of years from now think the same way of us?

Instead of a cube, I used a cylinder to make this goblet, which is why it looks much rounder. Then widened and narrowed it up and down accordingly to get the goblety shape. Blender makes scaling sets of vertices very easy, in any of 6 directions (not the 6 you might think - ask me if you are interested).

The tutorials I am doing slowly introduce new concepts and techniques. This time it was spotlights and shadows. Only one shadow so far, maybe I will do more in later models. And more details for reflections, such as fresnel effects. On both the goblet and the table surface. The final product looks like a drinking glass fit for a prince.

Glass Goblet

If a piglet is a small pig, and a droplet is a small drop, I guess a goblet is a small gob. Which is British and Australian slang for "mouth". So maybe you need a small mouth to drink from a goblet.

Amazingly, you can start with a cube in Blender, and end up with no straight lines anywhere. It has this thing called sub-surfaces. You give it a cube with 6 faces, tell it to sub-surface, and it turns each face into 4 faces. Which arrange themselves to halve the angles between the faces, so you end up with something rounder. Which sounds like the result after eating at McDonalds for too long.

If you sub-surface to level 2, you get each of the sub-surfaced faces sub-surfaced as well, so the 4 faces then becomes 16 faces. And you can sub-surface to level 3, 4, 5, etc. Each time the result is smoother than before.

Each part of this goblet was a cube, or something vaguely cubish (not cubist, that's those crazy painters from last century like Picaso). The stem and part you drink from was a very tall tube (or a "skinny" one if you don't mind being politically incorrect).

Ray-tracing comes in handy here again, not this time for reflections but for refractions. Like when you throw a spear into a lake to catch the fish but it misses by six inches cause the light has been bent. Until you adapt and aim 6 inches away from the fish. Clever human.

The base looks a bit too small, but I think that's an optical illusion from the perspective. In Blender you can view the scene in Orthogonal (straight-on) or Perspective mode, where things closer to you look bigger. Like that exam you haven't studied for tomorrow.

Rolling

Not stones. I wasn't thinking of moss, and neither were you. Although both of us are now I guess. Let's stop.

I took the die from yesterday, modified it a bit, duplicated it (Shift-D in Blender, nearly everything has a keyboard shortcut (designed for power users, remember?)), and rotated them all around a bit, in different directions, so they looked like they had just been rolled out on to a table. With some of them still falling, and spinning.

A very shiny table. In fact one that makes a good impersonation of a mirror. Without the "mirror, mirror on the wall" banter. To do this you have to turn on ray-tracing, which is trick for getting light to bounce of mirrors, and do other things that light does. And give somewhat realistic effects.

The modifications were making the single pip twice as large as the others, and pushing each of the six faces in a little to make the corners tighter. Better for rolling. Not that these virtual dice will ever touch a real table. Or moss for that matter. Sorry, I shouldn't have reminded you.

Die Another Day

James Bond is pretty cool. And it was a good movie. But I'm not really talking about that.

I promised a brighter (and hopefully better) version of the Die from yesterday. This one is a nice soothing red. The color of blood. Notice there is never much blood in Bond movies? Funny that, considering how much violence they have.

Anyways, this one has nice white pips. That are much rounder than the previous one (those were a bit squarish). Ok, not exactly white, more sort of a bluish tinge. Like the blue lips on a corpse. Very soothing.

Must be made of something very shiny, cause the light seems to bounce right off it. I forgot to mention, you can place one or more lamps anywhere you like in the scene, and get all sorts of light effects. Sunlight, spotlights, area lights, whatever. Intense, pale, colored, your preference. You can make that corpse look nice and shiny too, and show off those blue lips really well. Or not.

Die

No, I'm not being morbid. I'm not being nasty and telling you to commit suicide or anything.

My second Blender model is a die, you know, the singular of dice. Not just a cube with painted on dots, but a cube with nice rounded corners, and pips that are actually indentations in the face. This one looks a bit on the dark side, shades of dark purple and darker purple. Ok, perhaps a little on the morbid side, the color of rotting zombie flesh. Don't get too depressed, I'll do a brighter one next time.

Blender

Ok, its been 2 years since my last post. I've been busy. Sue me. I promise the next post won't take so long.

Have discovered 3D modeling. In a program called Blender. It is an awful lot of fun, creating objects from scratch, spinning them around in full 3D, then "rendering' them (creating an image from a specific camera position and angle, at any size you like).

The program has extensive tutorials, which anyone can follow. The interface seems somewhat overwhelming at first - its designed for power users not novices, so you just have to take your time and go through the tutorials and become a power user. Very powerful, has a ton of options, and lots of functionality, up to and including procedural textures, animation, and particle effects. But I am a long way from learning any of that yet, for now am just doing basic modeling.

Here is (nearly) my first model, that started as a sphere, and was pushed and pulled into something vaguely resembling a penguin. Not that he would fool any real aquatic flightless bird for a second.