Sidewalk rage pt. 2 : The workman's parking lot

Here's another great example of gross traffical inconsideration - the "workman's parking lot". Unfortunately it is not limited to workmen. Mailmen, delivery boys and regular drivers do it too.

Fair enough - if you have to unload stuff, you can take up part of the sidewalk untill your done, but when you're done you move the friggin car to the nearest REAL parking lot. And don't use as an excuse, that you have to constantly fetch stuff in the van. Just plan ahead, moron. If you need to lay carpets, you'll probably need your knife, your carpet tape, maybe glue, and your kneepads. Oh and the carpet of course. So bring it all at once. It's so simple, you could teach it to a jellyfish.

And mail/delivery services. I swear, if those people could drive the van into the office of the receiver of whatever-has-to-be-delivered, they would. But since they can't, they usually settle for the next best - parking on the sidewalk. But not at the broadest part of the sidewalk. Oh no - at the smallest. And if that happens to be even smaller because of garbage bins or the local florist's advertising signs, then all the better. It doesn't even matter if there's REAL parking 10 meters away, around the corner.
Twice in the last two days I've had to drag my bike out on to the road, between cars and trucks, to pass a mail van parked on the sidewalk. At the exact same place both days. Imagine if I was a parent with my kid in a buggy...

So you start to ask yourself : Do these people receive special training in being inconsiderate and ignorant?
Does MiB use workmen and delivery boys for neuralizer target practice, and thus make them forget what they were taught in driving school?
Is it a contest of some kind, awarding the most annoying parking of the month?

What the hell is wrong with you people? When I get rich, I'm gonna buy a Komatsu mining truck, and park it in YOUR driveway(s). Let's see how YOU like it...

*images copyright of someone else - if you don't want them here, let me know

ANT-roid

Project ID : ANT-roid (2004)
- relocation of an older piece

The ANT-roid (no it is NOT a spelling error) is made from a concept by Brian Prince. I've done some minor modifications to it, but I've also tried not to stray too much from the concept. Boxmodelling techniques were used, and the wires are placed
manually.

I have no idea what this robots purpose is, but I think it could be some kinda technician droid. Could be a drone operating a mainframe of some kind.













Full model




Head closeup


The Anti-grav/magneto drive...
- in lack of better knowledge of how stuff works, insert random techno-babble














Wireframe

Lego Racers - Bullet-time animation

Project ID : Lego Racers pull-back engine animation (2002)
- relocation of an older piece

Job-description :
A "teaser" for the good folks at Lego. Showing the core of the Racers - the new PullBack engine.
3D modelling, texturing, lightning/environment and animation (the cars are premodelled though). Some minor 2D touchups (for the still).

We had to figure out a way to illustrate the pullback engine inside the car(s). Used the famous "Matrix bullettime effect". Took a while to figure out how to do it right - but the answer was quite obvious.

- I should really redo the still, and add an occlusion pass.


See the animation here (3.6Mb - 640x360 Quicktime)

(Forest of the) Aerofly

Project ID : Forest of the AeroFly (Concordus Insecticus)
- relocation of an older piece

I came across a funny picture at Human Descent, showing a fly with a engine instead of head and eyes. I thought this would be a nice challenge, so I started recreating it in 3D.
Obviously it got a little out of hand, and as usual I ended up with a scene of several million polygons. I REALLY have to learn to limit myself.
I blame the very detailed rotary engine, and the hairs of the fly, which ended up using more polys than I had expected. But hey - at least I now have a detalied rotary engine, for when I decide to do an older plane.

I've used a variety of techniques for this image :
Mesh/poly-modelling for the fly, wheels, legs, wings etc.
Loft objects for the leaves
Scatter to get hairs on the fly
And I've used a lot of time post processing the image in Photoshop.
I should probably say images, because i split the scene up into 3 parts, and rendered them seperately, with passes of Diffuse, Specular, Lighting, Shadow, Occlusion and Zbuffer. Those passes gave me a lot of extra stuff to work with in Photoshop.

Below are final images, as well as some misc. pictures from the process.

Final image


Final AeroFly (stand-alone)


Rotary engine - Made from a mix of primitives, splines with lathe/extrude and polymodelling.










Aerofly wireframe - Wireframe screendump - prior to adding the hairs on the legs.







You can buy the rotary engine at Turbosquid or the3Dstudio

Anthems to the welkin at dusk

Yesterday was Skt. Hans (midsummer or Sct. John in many other countries). There's usually a load of bonfires (which the constant sound of the fire engine sirens would testify to) and singing around these. I didn't take any pictures of bonfire action, but I did shoot this as the dusk fell over the city. It was not really as dark as it seems, but try telling that to a mobile phone camera...

3D sculpt-O-rama

I've stumbled upon some funny little free applications, for doing 3D "sculptures" in.
One is Scherk-Collins Sculpture generator which generates meshes from a mathematical formular, based on a set of sliders you can adjust. It's somewhat limited, but still cool. It exports to .stl and that is not so cool, because it takes ages to import into 3dsMAX.
Another (and my favourite) is the Topological Mesh Modeling app. (TopMod) of Ergun Akleman. It can load any .obj mesh, and you can work with that using a set of different tools. One of the coolest functions I've used (so far) is the crust feature. Shelling made easy.
Anyways - I've made a few sculptures, based on those two pieces of software. Still only just getting my hands dirty.


Steel Rose (made with SculptGen). Actually only the top part was done in SculptGen, but i thought it looked a bit like a rose, so I decided to work a bit with that thought.


A "knot" of some kind. Done in TopMod.


Same knot, with a different shader.


Steel vines. Done in SculptGen.

- all images rendered in MAX with Vray.

Oh ye old nordic god of thunder...

Sometimes you strike gold on the internet - and sometimes you strike out...

- my hero...

*image copyright of someone else - if you don't want it here, let me know