Summary

Words:
Artifact - An object produced or shaped by human craft, especially a tool, weapon, or ornament of archaeological or historical interest.
Alien - A creature from outer space.
Vex - To cause perplexity in; puzzle.

Final Render









81 Iteration Render

The Final Stage!

I started this final Render during the weekend and it honestly took me a while to make much progress, I completely underestimated how complex this task would be. I decided to play around with materials and maps first with my object, so I found some textures and then went crazy with them.

Here are some of the render Results:




















So after getting fimiliar with the program I decided to find a background:

I liked the one on the right more but it needed a little modifying..

Perfect!

On monday I showed my work to some of my classmates and they introduced me to mental rays and the render trials continued:





















It was only in the evening when I really felt satisfied with what I was rendering...














and finally I decided to go with this Render:

Fin~

Let there be light! as I clicked Omni-Light

To be honest I really think that this is ok for the 81 Iteration Picture:

The tutor on the other hand gave me the a very strong impression that it wouldn't get me many marks..
So back to 3DS Max I go then and eventually after some playing around with the lighting I came up with this:

This wasn't enough and I continued to play around until I also got these:



















I decided It's a toss up between these two, and since I made these over the weekend I'll wait for Monday to get feed back on these two then.

Edit: After talking with some classmates I decided to choose the one on the right.

81 Copi - er -Iterations : >

So on saturday I installed 3DS Max onto my PC and jumped right into churning out the 81 billion required iterations for this project. I quickly became friends with the Modify menu and the first 20 were done fairly quickly:

I tried to tackle the Polygon Free-forming methods and completely failed, i think its simply because i beveled the edges making it harder to for new surfaces. I decided to  keep them as a representation that I tried and then I went back to the Modify list where I still exploring new ways to mess up my 3d image:

Things are getting pretty interesting. After a while I figured out that there were only about a dozen simple Modifiers that I could seem to use, but there are so many different combinations:

I managed to create 60 Iterations before the end of the week and I finished all 81 of them in the next studio. These last shapes were really interesting to create, they were becoming unreconisable. I also checked with a tutor whether I was ok that I didn't free form any of them much and they said it was ok which was reassuring:

Finally it took another studio lesson to neatly order them (colouring the original blue) and choose the final Iteration I would go with (marked red),  with abit of time spare to start playing around with lighting:

Devil in the Details

 So my words are:
Artifact - An object produced or shaped by human craft, especially a tool, weapon, or ornament of archaeological or historical interest.
Alien - A creature from outer space.
Vex - To cause perplexity in; puzzle.


I soon came to realised that I had created an image that could potentially be to complex to sketch in Solidworks but my worries were for nothing as eventually during the next  studio session I managed to complete it without to many problems.

I noticed that during this session I became alot more proficient at sketching in Solidworks but at the same time I learnt that next time I should of made my photoshop drawing more symetrical and used center lines to produce a better sketch. Finally I got a chance to Extrude it and check it out on 3Ds Max and here are the results:

Just by chance I had beveled a few of the edges in solidworks and because of this I immediately noticed the difference between the beveled and hard edges in 3DS Max. Thus this triggered the perfectionist in me and I decided to bevel all the edges.

At first I thought this would be simple, hoping that there would be a function to bevel all the edges at once, but I soon figured out that wasnt the case and I spent 2 hours doing it manually. Was it worth the work? I think so, but here is a comparison for you to judge:

During all this the lecturer and tutors pointed out to me that I was behind everyone else. So I decided to work during the weekend to create all my Iterations

Project 104 Continued

So having decided I was completely unsatisfied with my mechanical bird 3D image I once again set out on a campaign to find new inspirational images. At this point I knew I still liked the idea of making something that looked mechanical, refined and steampunkish.

Words: Gismo, Rigid, Spins

I was googling alot phrases that revolved around mechanical components and eventaully I Stumbled upon these:

I thought it was a good start and kept looking - by accident I came across tribal art that were themed around mechanical compositions:

These new pieces sparked a new idea, why not come up with something that looks like some kind of mysterious alien technology?

Words Artifact, Alien, Vex

I considered these questions as I customised the images in photoshop for Solidworks. Eventually I ended up with following the 2nd draft:

I figured this would work really well with the method that we use to construct our 3D images in Solidworks.

The Rocky Beginnings of 104's First Project

As Per Requested by the tutors I'll start by stating the more important Information first:
- My 3 words are Currently Mechanical, Rigid and Pointy.
- I will post the precedent images when I can get some jpgs of them.
- Finally I will also post up some pictures on my progress too.

Project Journal
So on Tuesday the 8th my studio stream started our 1st project. The first few steps were simple - find a couple of images to take inspiration from while coming up with 3 words to describe what you were drawing from them, then when you had done this you could then start to create a 3D variation of the images you had found.
Absolutely Simple!

Why then did it take so long to do this for me? Ideally we were meant to find these images before the studio started, so we could hit solid works right away. Since I was far to busy lazing about I didn't do this, so I spent the first hour of the studio having to find something on the internet. Eventually I found this:

President Image 1

Awesome! now we're rollin. With this image I spent the rest of the studio working to outline the bird in Solidworks and at the very end I had manage to create this:

At this point I was feeling pretty ambitious, so much so I decided with the next lesson to try and make a proper 3d image of the bird as I wasn't completely satisfied with my 2D sketch that had just been extruded from the page...

So fast forward to that next lesson and this is what I accomplished during that session:

Why Isn't this working???

So with the birds head, the very first object I decided to make I should note, I found that I couldnt create its basic shape, instead all I managed to do was extrude this flat triangle shape that I then couldn't modify to make it look anywhere near what it was suppose to be like. When I asked one of the tutors this was my response:

So for the rest of that studio lesson I tried in vane to create the correct shape for the head but I ended up conceding to the fact that I needed more experience before trying to tackle tougher things like this. I still wasn't really happy with my 2D bird so I decided to restart.

Continued later
P.S
During this blog post I was listening to:
Pendulum - Propane Nightmares
Check it Out

104 Blog Online!

Awesome I finally got this working. It was alot easier to set up then I thought it would be but alas sooner or later I'll have to personalise this blog. I wonder how I'll go about doing that... Hmmm.. a problem for another day!