Blender Weekend Challenge #417

This weekends challenge the theme was "what goes up must come down" so for my entry I created this simple scene...

Offroad Tires in Blender 2.5

Tonight I created some offroad tires in Blender 2.5

I'll try to get a tutorial put together outlining the techniques I used to create these later this week.  I'm really pretty happy with as it's one of my first project that I started with exactly 1 vertex as opposed to some other prim like a box or cylinder.

Here's the quick versions of how I did it...

1. Selected a tire as a reference, in this case I just wanted a tread pattern to target, not shooting for an exact match as the end result.
2. I created one strip of the tread pattern, placing quads around the treads I wanted.
3. Once I had created one repeating section, I duplicated it, slid it over and rotated 180 and lined up where the treads would meet.
4. Slapped on an array modifier, bound to a bezier circle and some tweaking to the offset to merge the first and last points correctly.
5. This mesh is smoothed and edge clipped but no Sub-D
6. For the rims I just drew a quick rim profile something like  "-________-" then spun it 360 degrees from top view, set the spacing to a number divisible by at least (2 * num of spokes you want) For me this was 20.  5 rims means I can make a couple interior edge loops and extrude every other 2 faces nd it comes together nicely in the middle.  A real quick an dirty way for a rim.
7. Finish by removing doubles and recalc normals
8. Finally, just some base material settings

Here is the result, no real materials or textures yet just some base colors...and the wheels are just a quick 10 minute throw together to stuff something in there.  I'll make a good wheel for them next.

Detroit Lions Schedule - Android Project

Now that the season is over, I threw together a quick placeholder image until the 2011 season schedule is finalized, then I will update it for next year.  Since we had almost 5,000 downloads on the Android Market I'm going to keep this project rolling as a tribute to Ndamukong Suh and the Lions.  If you are part of #TeamSUH, it's a great time to be a Lions fan!   I watched Suh turn the Huskers around and he is having the same impact on the Lions in his first year!  The future is bright for Detroit Rock City!  See you next season...

*****UPDATED*****
Now includes player roster and some 2010 Stats

Current Verision:

Modeling a Fender Jaguar in Blender

This past weekend I started modeling my Fender Jaguar in Blender.  Really practicing some modeling technique for various assets for games, etc.

• I'm really liking the neck and body
• Everything is box modeled except for the tuners, string posts and knobs which are based on cylinders
• Doing the frets with array copy was awesome, hadn't used that feature before and yeah I will be all the time now, especially for machines and the likes
• Once I get this completed I'll share the entire .blend project with anyone interested

After about 3 hours, this is where we are at...

Just threw in some diffuse on the base materials to distinguish some objects for this rendered still, but the next steps will be to finish the strings and bridge work then I will start in on the materials and texturing.  I'm hoping to finish this next weekend.

Here's a 360 degree video as well.... 

Making the move to Blogger!

All previous Croisened blogs can be located at www.croisened.com/blog but starting in 2011 I will be using this site instead.