2009-12-27

Steam Engine Vid Final

I managed to get the video running nicely.
Looks like every first frame in Blender anims is black, You just need to cut it from the finished vid.

Steam Engine Anim 8aj from Greg Zambo on Vimeo.

2009-12-23

Gas Station


Here is another work that I made long ago. It's pretty simple. I was experimenting with textures.

CUBIC WORLD





I had the idea several years ago (1996) for a city made entirely of cubic units, the idea being that they would be easily moved, stacked and locked together with two machines : a carrier and a stacker that would also lock them together.

Picture 1: Carrier
This has eight independently steered double wheel bogies, all of which have height adjustment. The vehicle also is double-ended, all of which makes the carrier able to pick up, carry and drop it's loads with no assistance. Since it is so maneuverable, it can often drop cubes exactly where needed and crab sideways along a row of double cubes. When parked they can be slid right up aside each other to save space. Since everything in the city is managed by a giant computer system, almost everything can operate without human control - but there are still plenty of jobs for people: machines don't always work perfectly and people need jobs.

Picture 2: Stacker
I had to invent a special stacker to move the cubes around and lock them into place with locking plates. Here is the Mk.1 Stacker: actually, it is not good enough for the job.
When I feel like it I will make a better model that can handle double cubes and carry them while scaling a stairway of cubes. It will also look a lot cooler than this.

Picture 3: Cube units
Here's the basic cube units designed: really a frame with removable panels. since the cube unit is about three meters square, a double gives people a room 6 meters long when they are used for housing, not opulent but acceptable for a house. Cubes would be fitted with various internal parts depending on their use before stacking, and the same system would be used for freight within the city as well.

Originally the city was going to be called "Unity" but that name has since been taken.
These are rough sketches (apart from the cube frames) and the final designs would have a lot more doodads, weathering etc. of course.

Space Container Loader


This is intended to load and unload the Container ship in my previous pic.
It doesn't have a lot of detail on it yet, It's kind of unfinished but I thought I'd post it here anyway - the idea is that it would operate around a space station/port and could also be used as a short-range shuttle between ships and port.

Space Cargo Ship


I made this a few months ago but somehow forgot to put it here.
Looking at it now I could improve the textures etc. - and I'm still learning.

2009-11-25

JEEP 3D WALKROUND

GPW walkround from Greg Zambo on Vimeo.



Here it is. Original res is 800 x 600.
Render time for this (320 frames) was about 3 hours.
I also made a wharehouse with crates, rooflights etc. for background, but the render time for it was looking like 21 hours on my new Core Duo with 4GB of ram, so here is just the Jeep instead.

2009-10-22

JEEP MODELLING FINISHED


Here it is with some textures. Modelling is pretty much done but I might try adding dirt for some extra realism. I might do a scene with it next if I can dream up something.

This will be going up for sale I think, but don't get the idea it could be a profitable exercise, the time it took to make is just nuts.

2009-10-17

Jeep WIP update


Here is an update. Just to give you an idea of how much work it is to make this, this is file No. 340. Each time I update I up the number.

2009-10-09

Gaston


Today I found this great free OSX Fractal program called Gaston. It makes 3D solids that you can rotate and he controls are simple sliders so you don't need a calculus degree to use it.
It's named after Gaston Julia, who we have to thank for the discovery of the Julia set.
Here's the page where you can get it .
I asked Leo if I could export the models but sadly it is not possible, so my search for a way to make them into real objects is once again foiled unless I reconstruct the shape from images.
You can also see that the shapes do not seem to be the same type of thing as the previous orbital -types seen below, made with Fracture.

2009-09-20

Jeep Work in progress


This is something I have been working on for a while. The good part is that there are heaps of photos and drawings to work from, the bad part is that no decent plans were available for the whole thing, so although some parts are definitely right ( e.g. the grill was traced from a photo as was the dash) the overall layout is an educated guess. The other side is not finished but it looks good from this view.

2009-06-05

Fractals in 3D part 3



My greatest annoyance is that the original images just never seem to have enough detail ! If I had the patience I might try to slice the original up into layers and fudge in the hidden detail so that it could be constructed as a whole multi-layer 3D solid - but there just isn't the time to do that. Maybe some fractal whiz can write a script that would draw just one layer of this at a time. I layered 3 variations on the same design and coloured them differently to get the final image.

Fractals in 3D part 2



This was an idea I had for making fractal furniture: this would be two table legs.
Of course, it has the same surface effect as previously noted but also as the detail gets smaller in the focii things blob out - still regardless of that, it would make some pretty unique furniture and you could cut the shapes on CNC equipment. Since the shapes are purely math, in theory the CNC could cut very, very fine detail.

Fractals in 3D




Here are some of my experiments taking fractal images and converting them into 3D solids.
First, the original fractal made in Fracture reduced to greyscale and you can see it is all smooth grads.
Below that is what it looks like when imported into Bryce 6. You can see that the smooth grads become stepped.

2009-06-02

The Hammer

This was my first try at copying a real object onscreen in 3D. I used textures made from photos to get closer to realism.

2009-05-12

Steam Carriage



This was an experiment to see how close I could get to an original.
Here is the original (made in 1874)and my final version. This was where I learned about using Subdivision surfacing and creases to make a really good shape.
I left it at this point since I don't have a use for it. Maybe I'll add more detail later if I find one.

Water tap


This is an example of using Booleans to make a complex shape.
I made it originally for the Gas Station.

2009-05-11

The Gas Station


This is something that I originally made in the 90's on a Mac II but I didn't have the software to finish it at the time: things like the hoses just couldn't be done. Now after some years I thought it a good exercise to complete it as it was originally designed using Blender.

P-39 Aircobra


This was my second Blender model. I tried various textures on it: this has a bump map for the panel lines and image maps for the whole thing.

Space Cargo Ship

A small space container ship undergoing braking maneuvers in the Pleiades.


This was made in May 2009.

2009-02-20

My first big work in Blender


Blender is a free 3D application and I've been learning it in my spare time.
Here is my first finished model, the MBT-70, made from plans and pictures found on the net.
This was exclusively a modelling exercise so the rendering is simple.

2009-01-05

Hi, you have reached my Art Blog.
Welcome.

This page is where I put my artwork. You are free to copy all work here but please give me credit if you use it anywhere.