More MIEF starship work

1st video in Houdini! Not horribly exciting, just a test to see the animated channels put to use:

Bob Loves Houdini!

Without further ado, I'm proud to present the initial model of CodeProject's Bob, moved into Houdini and ready for rigging! Hopefully after going through the rigging tutorials at 3D Buzz I'll be ready to set him up for animations!

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In the meantime he's some screenshots of how he got his start.

I modeled the initial mesh in Blender, simply because at the time it was easier and faster for me to do so. I started with a simple body with a head, body, arms and legs as separate objects.

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Then I started to bring the shapes together, with the goal of creating a single body mesh in a neutral pose. This is the chest and arms together:

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Now the legs added:

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Merging the head together (Bob was under anesthesia, so PETA doesn't have to worry at all...):

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Finally some initial work with setting up armatures in Blender.

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At this point I decided to really devote the time to Houdini, so I exported the various body bits as Wavefront (.obj) files, and then use Geometry nodes in Houdini to import them in, added a few lights, some materials, and voila!:

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Further work on the ship.

This isn't much, but I did re-org the network a bit, and since I've learned about the Object Merge node I realized I can have a subnet with a bunch of various details, things like panels, nozzles, etc, and then just reference them in using the ObejctMerge node.

So I have stuff like:

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From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

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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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From Learning 3D

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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From Learning 3D

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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From Learning 3D

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

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From Learning 3D

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

Earth, in it's new neighborhood

From Learning 3D

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!