[Horus397]

All WIPS for your transports go here.

[villalex]

Cant pass this Jam!

3D in Lightwave:

[arttorney]

I'll probably model this thing I made in Alchemy, and go for a 60s raising canopy type James Bond looking transport. I'm pretty new at this but it looks like I can do a boolean thing to cut out two sections from a sphere and use them for the clam shell and the windscreen. Then I just have to make some fins and fenders, put everything together, and texture it. Maybe I'll cut some stuff out of that mohawk fin to make this look more like Frankenstein's car from the David Carradine Deathrace 2000.

[Horus397]

Looking damn nice villalex!

[Horus397]

Alchemy is a really interesting app I've been wanting to experiment with, gotta make some time.

I really like the tear drop start of the overall shape, definitely a very pervasive recurring design motif from the 50's, early 60's auto industry.

[villalex]

Finding the panels and getting a quick (paint-over) test render

[villalex]

Engine/Front work:

[arttorney]

I'm actually trying, slowly but surely. The first WIP is after the boolean operations and the second one is after I have begun using mesh tools to deform the bottom.


I could see it would look stupid when I texture the glass unless I insert this slice thing. I guess I'll have to cut it into an "O" ring eventually so the cabin has a depth you can see through the glass.

[arttorney]

Still not a final. Needs bucket seats.

[arttorney]

I'm probably going to move on now and try to give Meg the Zombie Werewolf Witch a shot. I will tweak this if public outcry suggests I should.

[villalex]

Hey Arttorney,

Which software package are you using?
I would bump up the iterations on the render.
The bubble design element reminds me of Ed Roth's Mysterion.

No one did bubble Kustoms like Roth!

Try Squashing and stretching the model to get variations on the design.
Play with proportions... its a lot easier to do in 3D!
I think you really got the essence of this challenge. Nothing says retro-Future like Jetsons style spaceships!

While designing always ask:

"What can I do to make this more interesting?"
-Paul Richards

Speaking of that...
The bed looked a bit too plain:

[arttorney]

This is from a FOSS known as Art of Illusion. I've done two tutorials and this transport so far in my three weeks of 3D (other than SketchUp). I may do as you say about iterations of rendering if I can figure it out. The manual seems to lack an index, much to my chagrin. I may be able to get around that if I put this on one of my linux machines and employ a sophisticated use of the "man" command at the shell prompt. It won't happen soon as I am physically ill at the moment with something like the flu. The answer might not make much sense to me anyway since the program is in Java and my prior experience with scripted stuff was in Perl. If you are talking about bumpiness on the bottom and the little feet, I think I mighta shoulda told the machine to use approximating smoothing at the right time or something like that.

I'm still struggling to figure out how to manipulate meshes properly. This is made almost entirely using boolean operations on the sphere, square, and cylinder. My unambitious goal is to come up with a reasonably passable entry at this point.

Edit: I'm feeling better this morning and it has popped into my mind that you are probably talking about how many rays per pixel. I have a setting for that and I have been using the top number you get from the idiot buttons. I think it is possible to crank beyond that by typing new numbers into the dialog box that usually says "40" right about then.

Edit to edit: While doing a tutorial I can see that I have the option of cranking my rays per pixel quite a bit higher than I have been doing. It also seems obvious that finishing Meg the Zombie Werewolf in time is a lost cause for me at this stage in my development. I'll see if I can work in improvements on the transport. Whatever I have on Friday will be my final I think. I need to travel in the weekend.

[arttorney]

Is this any better?

I guess it looks a little bit better.

[Horus397]

Love the fishtail fins Charles. Don't know if there's a way to up the density of the fins you have in Sketchup to make the rounded edges look less stepped and more smooth without screwing up the shapes, but that would be a good thing. Also don't know if Sketchup does reflection for the glass, but that would be cool and to darken the glass just a bit.

[arttorney]

I can work on that. This is not Sketchup. Art of Illusion is more like a traditional 3D program with the four window layout, a bunch of mesh tools, a bunch of texture and material tools, and a bunch of rendering tools. It can animate.

The textures here are all home made by me during the course of this, although I admit I used tutorials for glass and metal things to know what numbers I generally wanted to use in hue and specularity, etc.

The fins are each a separate object and so I may be able to go into triangle mesh with one of them and tell it to try approximating smoothing to see what happens. If I don't like it there is always Edit>Undo. Edit: Approximating smoothing helped but the only complete solution would be a laborious process of subdivision.

The reflection on the glass I can probably fix by moving my light source. The lower right image (above) is showing a bit of a flash, but a closer and brighter light a little more to one side would make the shine bounce better I think. (maybe I'll try two lights) Edit: I only used one but I cranked up to three times the intensity and moved it. Between that and tinkering with the glass I think I made some improvements (Below).