Blender F1 Challenge 2009

The Blender F1 Challenge for 2009 started today and I decided to give it a go. For those who aren’t familiar, here is a brief summary from their website:

“The Blender F1 Challenge “challenges” Blender users to design, model and render their version of a F1 racer of the future. That “future” could be next year, in 20 years or even 1000 years into the future. It is all in the imagination!”

I’m not expecting my entry to win but I figure I may as well give it a go. Anyway, this is what I have so far. A basic UV unwrapped mesh ready for texturing. My texturing in the past has been quite bad but I am going to try hard on this one .

The only design rule of the competition is that the vehicle must utilize an open cockpit. I would quite like to have a closed one so I’m going to make it with a canopy which I can remove for the final submission and replace for my own enjoyment later.

Anyway, here is a work-in-progress screenshot (I hope you like orange):

Poseidon

This blog seems to be turning into a place where I just throw random stuff up to now. Haven’t been back in a while. Anyways, carying on with the sci-fi theme from the last post, I found a great website called Concept Ships. The blog showcases a huge collection of concept art for space ships of all kinds from many different artists. I came here looking for inspiration for a ship for my current 3D project and my search and eventual discovery led me on an interesting journey of discovery and creativity (which I lack). Here’s how it happened.

I was browsing Concept Ships when I saw this:

I thought “Wow. I wish I was that good at drawing so I could design a ship that cool.” Then I kept scrolling until I saw some work by a falla named Daniel Baker which I thought was cool. I looked at his work and saw this:

The first thing I thought was that it looked like some futuristic dragons tail with some armour. The image itself was of a bridge but I had this really strong image in my head of a spaceship in this sea-dragonesque fashion with armour plating on the tail. I have no idea why but I started to think about it as far is what it could do. Could it use the tail in some combat related way? Could the tail coil up and support the ship as a stand? What would the tail be made out of?

I had been drawing some ideas in the sketch book already so a did a little doodle of the ‘tail’ at the top.

As you can tell. I am really crap at drawing. But I decided to go with the idea so I did another page:

Before doing a last sketch before moving into Blender:

The 3D model itself is still a work in progress but this is where i’m at right now:

Again like most of my projects, I’ll probably never finish it but I’ll try!

By the way: i just noticed that the WordPress spell check doesn’t recognize the word ‘blog’. Why?

UPDATE – 22nd Feburary:

Have another render:

Station Under Construction

So I opened up Blender again. I have been kinda fed up of looking at a blinking cursor hoping some inspiration might just float my way. Writer’s block is torture. I may not be the best 3D artist but Blender helps me to arrange my thoughts and invent some new stuff which is completely off-topic.

This is where I’m at:

Station2

Right now, it is called “Station2″ just because it is the 2nd version of this model. I would like a better name for it though. It is essentially an orbiting military space port. Any ideas? Leave them in the comments down below.

Projekt 2

Well, I achieved my goal. Projekt may not be the best task manager ever but it does what I want and I learned quite a lot in the process. Here is the final product:

Projekt

In order to keep track of all my tasks, I created a simple Ruby on Rails app using NetBeans (which I think is the best Rails IDE as it runs the server and has Ruby and Rails setup and ready to go from square one). Here is a quick screenshot of what I have created so far:

I would love to get this hosted somwhere so I can use it remotely.

As I am still learning about Rails, development will probably be slow but right now, I does what I want so I’m happy

Blender Keyer

So I decided to make a keyer in the blender compositor. Using my basic knowledge of compositors I finally arrived at an effective keyer. The greenscreen image I used was a sample image from The Pixel Corps and I used one of my own images as the background.

Digital Arts – Fantasy digital matte painting

I have been interested in learning the art of matte painting for a while now and a very nice tutorial that I stumbled across is located at Digital Arts Website.

The tutorial goes through the steps to create the image above mainly with some freehand painting and prolific use of the clone tool. I would go check it out if you are interested in this kind of thing.

nD Theory

A quick note before beginning, this is going to be a long post on complicated and mind-bending theoretical physics. Proceed with extreme caution!

As a few people know, I am quite interested in theoretical physics, metaphysics and mathematics. One idea which I have been thinking about recently is quite interesting (I think) so i decided to share it.

Video Copilot and Blender

If you follow Video Copilot at all, you will know that most of the tutorials cover visual effects in Adobe After Effects. The only other tools used in the tutorials are Photoshop and 3D Studio Max. So imagine my supprise when I saw this on the front page:

With my birthday coming up, I think I know what I’m asking for . I’m also waiting for Creature Factory which isn’t out yet

Big Buck Bunny

So after months of waiting, Big Buck Bunny – the end result of the Peach Project – has been released to the wild. While the DVD ISO isn’t avalible for download yet, you can buy a DVD or view the movie by itself. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, the Apricot Project is underway and the new additions to Blender are looking very cool indeed.