Fire Power

Did I mention that I'm terrible at blogging regularly? That's because I'm actually working all the time at something, either art or writing, but not blogging. Here's the latest thing I've modeled, a .38 Special revolver, and it's for sale at Turbosquid. I also have other firearms for sale there, including a .380 semi-auto, a .243 deer rifle and a .32 Iver Johnson:

.38 Special Revolver, rendered in MentalRay

I'll try to post updates more regularly, but don't hold your breath.

Busy Beetles

I finished the Mercedes, it turned out very nice.  I really ought to try to update this blog more often.  I've been busy with freelance, but I decided that I can't just take the weekend off, so I started modeling a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, after being inspired by an article about the first real-world object to be 3D scanned, all the way back in 1972! It was "scanned" by hand, with students at the University of Utah taking measurements and manually entering them into a computer.*  You can read about it here.  My, how far we've come. Now students of computer art everywhere get to complain that modeling cars is hard, without even having to do any of the mathematical calculations to accomplish building a car in the computer.  The most amusing bit about the whole thing is, the original computer scan of that Volkswagen cost more than the car itself.  

1962 Mercedes Benz 190SL :: I even rigged the roof to retract

I think I'd like to take up painting in my non-existent spare time.  Or sculpture. 

*A computer in 1972 was probably about the size of your house.

Human Model - Female

If you know me, you know I'm primarily an animator and rigger, but I decided that I like modeling too and would like to improve. That is why I started modeling things for TurboSquid. I think my modeling has improved immensely since I began doing that and so the other day I decided to model a human. I've started it and when I have the preliminary geometry done, which I'm hoping will be later today or tomorrow, I'll post a render.

Mechanical Rigging: A Patio Umbrella

I decided that rigging an umbrella would be interesting, and so I've done a patio umbrella, it's available at turbosquid.

The hardest part was figuring out how to make the umbrella's arms work. I tried various constraints without hitting on anything that worked the way I wanted it to, so I put the model aside for a day and then it hit me at some point that using IK would work. So that's what I did. It works like a charm too.

Oriental Fan 3D Model

I modeled something pretty cool today, an oriental fan! It's available for sale at turbosquid.com. I'm very happy with how it turned out. It took me a while to work out how I was going to get the paper part of the fan to deform and I tried two methods before finally figuring out what worked. Check it out, there are .mov files over at TurboSquid that show it deforming.

Winchester .243 Model

I decided to model my beautiful .243 Winchester Model 70 Featherweight. Here are some renders:


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Click for the larger version. Available for sale at TurboSquid.

I never realized how complex the bolt was in it until I started looking closely at how it worked. And that explains why bolt action firearms are a fairly recent invention!

First post!

I thought that I would start a blog to keep up with what I'm working on at the moment. I decided last night to model a temple, I had an idea in my head of how it should look, but then my computer went a bit crazy, and I had to run check disk. Long story short, I had some bad sectors on the hard drive, it seems to have recovered my files and everything seems fine, for now anyway. I guess I need to look into getting a new hard drive.

I have been updating my website with what I'm working on, but it's a bit cumbersome to edit the html code every time I want to update, blogger is so much easier.

The latest thing I've posted on my website is a rotation of the giraffe model I did.