Blender

Ever since getting heavy into Radiance back in the day, and producing bad renderings on my beloved Amiga 2000 (until I got my MacBookPro, that was the last computer I honestly liked) with Caligari before that as a kid, I've always been a big old rendering geek. Heck, I'm even going to be teaching a lab on it (Mental Ray in Revit) at this year's Autodesk University.

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Our friend, Michael Christian, a well-known local artist, approached us with an idea to produce some small, more affordable pieces for a more down-to-earth show he was going to have.

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So let's pick that cube, then click 'Add Multires' and then click 'Add Level' five or six times. You'll see that the cube subdivides into a smooth egg shape.

Now switch to Sculpt Mode, and pick on the new Sculpt tab that appears. Leave the rest of the options as-is, we'll come back to them later.

Then simply click and drag over the top of your cube, and you'll see that it 'draws' on the 3D surface of it. If you've got a Wacom tablet, it's pressure-aware, so if you press harder it will draw more (and vise-versa). Swap the 'shape' setting to 'Sub' instead of 'Add' to carve into the shape instead. Picking the 'Airbrush' option will make the warping happen constantly as you hold down the mouse button, instead of just when you drag the mouse. Size and Strength should be obvious. Then there are the other Brushes and the Symmetry buttons...

Brushes can also be derived from Textures. This is way cool. Click on the 'Brush' tab, and then select and empty slot; you'll get a list of all the Textures in your Scene and you can pick one. Here I'm just using a Noise Texture called 'Tex'. I also upped the subdivision level another notch or two via the Multires. Cool thing with this is that you can turn it up or down as you need more speed or more detail when modeling (and rendering).

Go back to the Sculpt Tab, pick Draw, then Sub, up the strength a little, and now when you draw on the model, it will take the Noise pattern and apply that directly to the mesh. Too cool!

Have fun with Sculpting! As you can see it's a terribly powerful and fast way to create very complex models, and a wonderful addition to an already great tool!

 

Rev: 12/15/06

 

Hey! This little tutorial made it onto Blender Nation, the best Blog for all things Blender. Welcome everyone, hope you find this a help!

 

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Got this prototype modeled up just the other day, playing around with other ideas that we could do for coffee table bases, and this one was too much fun so we're gonna do it. It's two of the Space Invaders, actually the same one in it's two 'positions' it flashes between while flying about sending screaming electric death to those below. Put them together, and they can make a table, ala Noguchi...

The top would be a thick piece of clear plastic, with the underside carved out in the shape of one of the 'space demons' that were painted on the side of the original stand-up arcade game. Here it is shown on a white shag rug (something I'm not neat enough to own, actually, so I just throw them into my renderings instead).

Still not certain what material to make it out of. The above renderings, all done in Blender (new version! woot!) and Yafray (finally getting the hang of that rendering engine), are thinking that it would be made from a thick, shiny plastic. But here's one out of wood, to give it a try...

Watch for this one, soon to be on the store! Oh yeah, we got a working store now! Double woot! 

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So here's some more pics of the recption desk we finished recently. We're super happy with how it came out! Modeled in Revit, with parts modeled in Blender, and cut via CNC out of sustainably harvested walnut, this was our first big complex job we did via our design process.

We love the red our client choose for the wall behind it, it really makes it pop.

That's the wing, the only part that was modeled in Blender (and cut from solid walnut). The rest was modeled in Revit (and cut from walnut veneer plywood, with the guts just being cheap rough plywood). All the wood in the desk is sustainably harvested. The finish is a nice dark walnut stain with a poly sealer over the top.

We had this hourglass custom-made. Seeing that this lobby design is based upon the Death Jr. game, the client requested an hourglass prop for the table. It's a working hourglass, as in it really takes an hour for the sand to go from the top to the bottom. We had it custom inscribed to say 'To Backbone: Thanks for making my kid look cool. Death' and the other side has their logo on it. Everyone loves it! And I kinda want one for my own desk now.

The client also wanted a classic phone for the desk to go with the overall look. Ebay to the rescue, we found this lovely little bakelite number. It's a great shape and has a really nice action on the wheel. Very satisfying technology, with a nice and heavy receiver and cloth cord.

Y'all will see a lot more photos of this lobby soon, for we'll be finishing up the rest of the job here shortly! There's a logo to go on the wall (that's 80% done) and a display wall we'll be putting up soon. Our first 'big job'! So excited...

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Just a silly idea, but here's a chair prototype that we're thinking of doing, lots of different versions with lots of different profiles. But the first one, well:

What can I say. I grew up in Wyoming.

And I'm finally starting to figure out more about Blender. The profiles were modeled using curves, which can be given a thickness so that they become 3D solids (under the mesh settings, look for 'Extrude' under 'Curve and Surface'), and also were linked so that if you change one, the other changes too (via the 'Alt-D' shortcut). The seats were subdivision surfaces, simple meshes 'melted'. It was rendered in Yafray, which as you can see I'm still learning. Now to just figure out how to get flat profiles cleanly out of Blender for cutting on the CNC..

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Here's a sneek peak at a big job we're in the middle of. We're doing a lobby for a local game design company, and we're very excited about it. The overall theme of this lobby is based upon an orginal creative work (a fun PSP game and a neat comic) of this company called 'Death Jr'. It's theme is that you are Death's kid and you've got to save your dad (who's in trouble because of something you did). We loved this image of Death's desk in his study from the comic:

So we proposed to base the reception desk design off of it. We were very excited that the client liked the idea, and we designed and modeled the desk in Revit:

Which formed the majority of the desk. However, we wanted to do some very custom parts for the desk. We mocked up these wings for the front in Revit, but we wanted them to look more carved instead of flat. So I exported the wing from Revit into Blender, and then remodeled it until we liked the look:

And then we exported that model from Blender to the CNC toolpathing software, and then carved it out from a solid chunk of walnut we got from Pals down the street (certiified sustanably harvested, Pals rocks). Those extra bits in the model are to save some of the wood, so we're not carving it all away:

Then we sanded and finished the wing. We're very happy in how they came out:

They were a nice touch to the overall desk.

We'll be posting a lot more photos of this when we're done, but here's a sneak peak of what it looks like now:

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Wow, am I jazzed about this:

http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/
It's a tool that lets you take 3D 'screenshots' and save them down as 3D models. So, like, you open up Google Earth, hit a keyboard combo, and it saves what you're looking at as a 3D model. See, here's looking at the area surrounding my new gig:

And here's that same 3D info grabbed out of Google Earth, Buildings and all, and then pulled into Revit:

It works for games too. Some people are using it to generate 3D models of their Everquest/WoW characters, so that they can clean up the mesh and get them 3D printed. So that they can have a real-world little figurine of their in-game character. THAT'S SO COOL!

(image from the OGLE site)
Or, in my case, I could grab a model from something and then feed it to the CNC-table to make a real-world version!
It works like this, and it only works with programs that use OpenGL:
It's actually two tools, one that can siphon off the OpenGL system calls, and this OGLE tool that can then turn those calls into a .OBJ file.
Whenever your system is using OpenGL for anything, it's sending the 3D info you're looking at to the graphics card, which then draws it on the screen. It does this because it's faster that way than the processor doing that job instead. So once it's set up you hit a keyboard combo that you define to trigger it, it steps in and grabs a 'frame' of info, and then passes it to the OGLE tool, which then in turn turns that OpenGL data into a standard .OBJ file. You then can open that file in any 3D application, and in the above example I saved it out as a DWG using 3D Studio and then imported it into Revit...

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OK, so a friend (one of the two people who read this Blog) explained to me more about the whole X11-over-SSH voodoo, and I thought I'd post it here as a follow up. I'm very proud to present that information to the other reader of my Blog, who probably knows it already:

So says my friend SPACEMONKEY:

Hey, I really liked that description of doing the blender  remote stuff (at http://www.becausewecan.org/node/23 ); in the whole 'spirit-of-blogging' thing, I might could shed some light on the X11DisplayOffset thing: Hope you've got some coffee...

In X, you're not limited to having a single remote host fooling around on your desktop (or vice versa). If you wanted to play with two, three, or (even) four other machines, all opening up windows on your laptop, X11 does this by having all those machines open sockets up to the Xserver running on your desktop (which the Xclient finds, typically, by a environment variable called DISPLAY). 'k?

Note this is a different model than, say, telnet or ssh; with those, you connect to the server and the server starts talking to you. With X, you run a program on the server and it connects back (opens up sockets) to your client.

Back in the golden days when no one cared about security (ie, when X11 was developed) that was swell. But, when you introduce ssh, it needs to be able to hijack (tunnel) all the socket data between two machines so it can be encrypted before going over the wire (otherwise it's just a quick packet sniff away from the cover of the NY Times).

Okay, back at the server side, you run a fancy program to look at pictures of puppies. The fancy program tries to open up a window, the local X instance creates a socket (just like normal)... but it can't talk directly to your laptop, as you're running ssh. But, ssh doesn't *know* you're running an X11 program and there's no way for it to (cleanly) know about programs you're running that talk to your laptop, so it can't intercept the socket calls it needs to tunnel the traffic back. And, furthermore, you could ssh into one machine, telnet from that machine to *another* machine, and run a program on that third machine which opens a window back to your laptop (all through the magic of X).

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