More Houdini work

Here's a revamp of the previous marine ship from before, only this time I'm really forcing myself to get to grips with modeling in Houdini:

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A flat rendered close up

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further away:

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Further refinements from tonight:

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More Camera work

Finally got around to adding some textures and learning how to use Blenders UV editor. Not too hard to do, but I don't think I'm applying the actual texture image quite right. But not bad for a first start:

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Here's a final render with different lighting, fixes to the textures, and a better flash bulb.

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Canon Camera model

Using this tutorial for modo (http://www.luxology.com/community/user_tutorials/modeling/camera/ ) I was able to roughly recreate something similar in Blender. Blender has some great tools, but it became pretty clear that modo has some fantastic modeling shortcuts, making it even easier to model something like this. Hopefully Blender will add these in the near future.

Here are some shots of the results so far:

The first cut of the model,

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A little while later, after all the basic elements were in place:

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This is the same model in an "exploded" view:

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Sorry for the inconvience, but we've moved...

Earth, in it's new neighborhood

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This was thanks to some fantastic tutorials:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=76226
http://www.enricovalenza.com/realplan.html
and
http://chamberlinproductions.110mb.com/blenderearth.html

And no, I didn't just swipe the .blend file, I actually walked all the way through the tutorial, and, gasp!, even sort of understand how it works!

CAD style modeling in Blender

I found this fantastic site here: Modeling a 608 Bearing that walks you through modeling a fairly complex set of shapes (at least for a newbie). It pretty detailed, and quite clear, and hte results are quite cool. After having gone through it, you definitely feel like you have a lot better grasp on how to conceive of shapes and how to get the final output you want - and it's *nothing* like how you'd work when you draw freehand.

Some shots:

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Note the change in lighting! Changing the second light to a spot light, bringing it out a tad and focusing the spot on the bearings made a huge difference in color, bringing out the "gold" color of the bearing cages and allowing you to see the fold over clips much better, better contrast and so on.

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Traveling at the speed of light in Blender

Simple, silly, but looks quite cool!

Take a scene, set up a camera, go to the World buttons view, add a texture (with an image associated with it). Click on the Map To tab, and make sure that only the "Hori" button is toggled on. Instant background.

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Now, let's tell Scotty to turn on the light speed engines, so flip to the "Texture and Input" tab, and change the "View" toggled button to "AngMap".

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Play with the dX, sizeX, dY, and sizeY values and you can get something like this:

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First model with Houdini!

This is my first attempt at a real model with Houdini. No textures on the model yet, but it's a halfway decent first stab. Note to the Blender folks - lighting and camera positioning in Houdini sure seems ALOT easier than in Blender.

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