“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):

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:

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.

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

Here is a screenshot of my setup with groups collapsed:

And here is one with all the nodes ungrouped:

I haven’t tested it on any other green screen images or movies yet but any adjustments can be made in the channel key node. Another think I have to point out is that the tracking markers have not been keyed out. A separate key or garbage matte could take care of those.

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.

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.

“Dimension”

Contrary to what some people say, a dimension is not a parallel universe or anything of the sort, it is mearly a direction. As humans, we perceive three dimensions: x, y and z. Some people say that time is the 4th dimension (thus making x, y, z and t, however I will get onto that in more detail later. A computer screen is capable of displaying two dimensionally so to begin with this will make total sense.

If we think in terms of a single dimension (lets call it x). An object can exist at any point along the line and can move along the line from left to right but that is the only direction it can move in.

Using 2 dimensions (eg, x and y), we have a plane. An object now has 2 values for it’s position (or any vector value). The object can move by any amount in the x or the y direction.

In 3D space we have the directions x, y and z. An object now has 3 directions of freedom. An interesting point to make is that for 2 objects to collide in 3D (or 2D) space, they must have a point occupying the same x, y and z coordinates. Objects won’t collide if only 2 of the 3 coordinates match.

Take this example:

In the 1st image, 2 objects are moving towards each other in the y dimension while remaining the same distance apart in the x direction. In the 2nd image, the points are the same distance from each other in the x direction as they were in the 1st part. However, they now share the same y coordinate. If this were 1D space (using the y direction), the objects would have collided as there is no other dimension for them to move in. Similarly, seeing this situation from a 1D point of view would look like this:

In the 2nd frame, from a 1D perspective it would appear that the objects have not collided and have gone through each other as there is no perception of a 2nd dimension

This same principle applies to 3D space too which is what humans can see and perceive. However, where this gets complicated (and interesting) is when we start layering on more dimensions. I believe that there could potentially be an infinite number of spacial dimensions even though we can only see 3 of them. As science has proven many times over in the past, “just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

As i’m sure you are aware, it is possible to represent a 3D object in 2D space :

I like to think of this as compression, the idea is there (it conveys a sense of depth) but the detail of the z direction is lost through the compression. The process is also known as projection.

A similar effect is possible with 4D objects although it is harder to understand. The tessaract is a 4D analogue of the cube:

This is one way to represent a tessaract. You can see more in the Wikipedia entry along with some animations.

If we take a look at collisions again (taking the 4th dimension to be w), all the things we see collide with each other which means that they have the same values for their location in the 4th dimension (w). Weather this changes as the object or if it remains constant, I don’t know. It is also possible that we can’t see objects with different values for w but we could also unknowingly move an object in 4D space while moving it in 3D space. As we cannot perceive 4D space, I doubt that we will ever know.

Just imagine what it would be like to layer even more dimensions on top of this to get to 5D and 6D etc.

Time isn’t an illusion

For a long time, I believed that Douglas Adams was correct when he wrote “Time is an illusion caused by the passage of history” in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” Although it was meant to be a joke, it actually made perfect sense to me, that is until I started to learn about relativity and time dilation. I realised that if gravity can bend space and space is made of many dimensions, and gravity can also bend time then it must be made of dimensions too. This thought changed my point of view completely. While most people view time as a single dimension (think time-line) it could easily be made up of more than one even though we can only comprehend one (just like space). While time isn’t space (collision laws don’t apply) other rules could apply.

Imagine if time were 2D. While we can’t travel backwards and forwards through time at will, everything has a velocity which is affected by gravity etc. Just assume you can navigate the time line (or time plane). One theory of alternate universes states that at every decision, new branches are made in the time-line (one for each decision’s outcome). 2D space would allow for this. In a diagrammatic form, probability tree diagrams would be a good example:

Anyways, I should probably wrap this up. Multi-dimensional theory certainly opens a lot of interesting and confusing doors.

Wow. That’s a lot of words. Definitely my longest blog post ever. I hope someone found this interesting. I did

Maybe at some point I will post something about string theory.

That’s a wrap!

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

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.