7 posts tagged “3d”
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
I often get inquiries -- "Can I buy the entire set of orange men for a reduced price?" For perhaps over a year this little known opportunity has existed on the rare gem of a website known as "Clipartof.com".
A little factoid concerning clipartof.com: The Orange Man practically lives there. I like to think of all of the websites I supply my art through as cities that I visit as a traveling merchant. Examples to follow:
Istockphoto is like that bustling super-metropolis filled with art and talent of every sort, fully populated with coffee shops where people exchange ideas and vision together. Its a supercity that is sparkling and refined.
Shutterstock strikes me as a more industrial city with merchants hurriedly running in and out, with their product selling faster than it can be stocked. Its a little more unrefined, but useful to those who have more creative ability.
Dreamstime and Crestock are somewhat like those medium sized towns with their own set of strengths.
Clipartof.com, though, is far different. Its like a small private town, almost a gated community. Only a few artists in comparison are found here, but the selection is the cream of the crop as far as illustrations available. Its more family oriented, and there is not even the slightest hint of beaurocracy. One might think it was a private club secretly opened to the public -- the best of both worlds! Any artwork bought from clipartof.com also has a much wider ability for use due to the user license agreement.
This is where the orange man has truly blossomed and discovered himself, and where the best deals can be found in his use! Most sites have one or two color versions of the design mascot (also known as orange man), but Clipartof.com has 11 color versions! Clipartof.com is also the only site that sells them in bulk packages for a reduced rate. For those of you who have taken a liking to the orange man, its highly, highly suggested that you see both the package deals as well as the color versions.
Feel free to contact them with questions. They will treat you like family.
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
As promised, here is the first free image hot off the render pipeline! Nikola Tesla's Magnifying Transmitter. More than likely I will be producing many more images on this subject.
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
Wardenclyffe Tower 3d Visualization,
Upcoming JesterArts Illustrations.
Would you like to read an inspiring, powerful, and yet sad story? Read Man out of Time, by Margaret Cheney. Nikola Tesla was different from other inventors of his day or prior in many ways. He is credited for pioneering the concept of alternating current, creating the alternating current motor, plus a few other concepts that literally drive industry today.
But who has ever heard of the wireless transmission of electrical energy? He had hoped to accomplish this through his concept of the "magnifying transmitter". This was his greatest dream, of which all of his work was leading up to. It would be a clean, efficient, and elegant way to provide communications services and energy to the entire globe without power lines or environmentally destructive methods of any sort. It seems like a thing of the future, and yet it was on the verge of becoming a reality as far back as 1903.
The Wardenclyffe Tower which was to house the magnifying transmitter was near completion and then shut down when investors realized a disturbing fact concerning this invention: Who can profit from supplying free energy? A new type of technological society was at its birth in those days. Industry much the same as our present day was powered not by electricity, but money. So many of Tesla's inventions and endeavors were really just stepping stones to this grand invention which he would never complete due to economic reasons. He did not see this as a defeat. He stated: "The present is theirs ; the future, for which I really work , is mine."
Photo example below of the almost completed Wardenclyffe Tower:
So this project, a realistic 3d depiction of the Wardenclyffe tower, has been on my to-do list for a long time. I'll be using the free open source software Blender 3d to create it, and the resulting illustrations will be free to use keeping in stride with the purpose behind the invention itself: Keeping it FREE.
I'll be giving attention to all of the important details and will be making special efforts not to stray from accuracy. I will also do various renditions of the same model to serve educators and enthusiasts alike for any purpose they find. It will be free, and no, its not a marketing ploy. Keep checking back for updates.
NOTE: I am looking for qualified volunteers to help with layouts for the tower itself. See this thread:
http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=40841
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
I've been doing so much 3d work lately I've been dreaming in polygons. To get to sleep I count vertices, and when I wake up I'm subconsciously thinking of rigging strategies to get the best movement out of a character.
Its time for a vacation, I think. Today I stopped at a bike shop and checked out some Kawasaki Ninjas, and for once I actually found myself interested in the real thing, and not just wondering how I'd make a model of it.
But while I'm still locked in the 3d thing, exploring new horizons with concepts, here is a small breakdown of how this stuff is done! Are you a customer? This will be enjoyable to see what is done to get to the finished product.
No doubt you've seen enough behind-the-scenes extra features -- heck, a twelve year old knows it by now -- to know whats involved in the creation of a 3d character! But here's another one in case you haven't had enough!
Most 3d artists enjoy showing the rendered product, but many 3d artists want to see the wireframe where a true assessment of quality can be made. Its not enough to construct the 3d model to "look right" but the "Edge flow", that is, the arrangement of the geometry, must be properly created to allow the greatest and most natural range of movement.
The map on the right is a typical texture map, wrapping an image around the model itself. All 3d model textures are stored as flat images, assigned to "UV coordinates". UV coordinates are the same as XY, except with different letters, so that its not confused with XY coordinates of 3d space.
The end result is an ant of low geometric detail that looks realistic, due to a strategic use of textures.
Leo
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
Yet another 3d robotic creation! This was a lot of fun -- I wanted to make a robot that was somewhat realistic and didn't take long to render. The result was this 3d webcam robot.
He is created in blender 3d, and uses material nodes (basically overlapping material effects) as well as render nodes (sort of like an in-program post-processing tool like photoshop) to create the effect of realism. He doesn't actually require raytracing to achieve the "real" so renders take less than five minutes. In the near future I'm going to get a huge line of images produced on a variety of subjects. In the meantime, his existing images are highly useful!
Feel free to check them out!
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
Creating Hydraulic or Pneumatic Tubes in Blender 3d Tutorial
By "hooking" points of paths to "empty" objects in blender 3d you can create tubes that move with the objects they are connected to via parenting -- in this case, a pneumatic piston used for a robot arm.
This tutorial assumes you are familiar with basic modelling in blender. So I won't go into great detail with basic functions like how to move and rotate objects, parent/child objects, etc.
So how bout some pictures to see the effect at work!
Piston level with tubes:
Piston rotated counter-clockwise:
Piston rotated clockwise:
Looking at the above examples, you can see that regardless of which way the piston is rotated, the tube sticks in place to where its connected. Its a very useful effect for many purposes, and not hard to impliment at all. For this project the piston will be used to move a robot's arm, and to make it realistic, I wanted the tubes running through the mechanical work of the robot, flexing and bowing naturally.
1: So first, in the usual manner, add a UV sphere. That is [spacebar, add, mesh, UVsphere]. See screenshot below.
2: After you've created your UVsphere and hit [tab] to get into object mode, add a path over the same spot. [space, add, curve, path]. I suppose you could use a bezier curve or something, but I use paths because they are less restrictive.
3: Now you end up with this millipede looking thing. Thats a path. All those things comprising the millipede's legs are actually arrows showing which way the path is pointing.
4: Move the path [g] left, so that the tip of the path is somewhere around the middle of the sphere or near its left side. It doesn't matter for this example really, we're just making a rough example to learn from.
5: To make your path into an actual tube type in the values you see here. Make sure you are in edit mode and you will see the little window here holding the values listed below. Change them to what you see in the little screenshot below. If you do it right, you will see it go from a basic path to a tube. Notice as you move points on the path that the tube conforms around it.
Please note I moved the path over a bit so you could see the example better.
6: Here is where the really cool trick comes in. Click on the path and [tab] into edit mode if you are not already there. Click [right mouse button] the last point on the path. Then push [ctrl H] which will bring up this "hooks" window. Select the "add new empty" option to add an empty object.
An "empty object" is simply a placeholder, or an invisible object, which is handy for situations like this. They don't render, but are objects nonetheless. It'll make sence in a few steps.
7: See those arrows pointing in line with the X,Y,Z axis? That is an empty object. True to its name, its empty! Nothing but an invisible place holder. Thankfully we have this handy XYZ arrow thing so we don't lose it. Notice if you move the "empty" the path will always point to it. One more step left!
8: If you didn't already anticipate it, we're going to make the Empty a child of the UVsphere. Do this by selecting the two of them and pushing [ctrl P] where it will ask "make parent" and you select "OK". Now the Empty is a child of the UVsphere object, and wherever you move the UVsphere the tube will go to. Now all sorts of possibilities are running through your mind -- like vacuum hoses, exposed arteries on mutant beasts, cables...!
See the screenshots below to see the effect at work:
This ends my simple tubes tutorial. Check back for more how-tos on Illustrator and Blender 3d!
The JesterArts/Leo Blanchette Design and Illustration blog has moved to WordPress: http://jesterarts.wordpress.com/ Check it out for designer tutorials and JesterArts updates!
Did you know that its not expensive, or necessarily that hard learn 3d art and animation?
I have a feeling this is still not common knowledge.
www.Blender.org Check it out! Its a very, very powerful 3d package. Generally to buy a 3d package, you can expect to spend an upwards of $1000 if you plan to do anything serious. Blender 3d is open source, created by the combined efforts of programmers and 3d enthusiasts around the world. Its free to download, free to use, and free to profit from!
The catch: No fancy tuturials inside the program itself, such as the pricey packages have. But there is a large supply of knowledge on the internet, many forums dedicated to blender where you can find person/person help, and a few good books on the market.
And if I can give one little hint of advice, should you choose to check it out -- Don't be intimidated! (And learn the hotkeys). It looks hard, but its not.
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