www.ditl.org

So I've been contemplating trying to get into 3D design and rendering. I've tried it before, but found it way complex and difficult - the software seems to be designed to drustrate the newbie. But I'm giving it another go, and here's my first rendering! I followed a tutorial on youtube, so it's not so much my own work as a "monkey see, monkey do" type thing. My cup is a bit more wonky than his, but I'm surprised at how well this came out! I figure I need to try and do a few more tutorials... okay, a lot more tutorials... before I try anything of my own.

His mug :



My mug (don't laugh)

Very good really, Whats with the little black bit on top of the handle?

Um, that's a hole where I screwed up melding the handle into the cup.

I thought maybe it was an NSA mug and that was a mic.

My first pass at creating something of my own. One of the AMP turrets from my Coalition ships, which looks like this :



First pass :



I'm pleased with how it's coming along so far...

One problem I have is that everything seems to be done "by eye". I've really big on everything being exactly to scale, and exactly to the designed dimensions. But thus far, all the tutorials I've seen simply eyeball how large everything is in relation to one another. I'm hoping the program has some way to be more exact about things, or it's not going to be of much use to me.

Pass 2, with more detail, adjusted lighting, and a higher quality render...

And at a different angle... each render takes maybe ten minutes at this quality.

And another, playing around with moving the camera. It can be quite tricky getting the kind of angle you want.

Did you make each individual barrel? Or just make one and duplicate it?

Made one and duplicated. Never would have gotten them the same size, otherwise.

I've hit a problem now. I am trying to vary the shades of the different bits, so the barrels are a darker grey, the turret hull a medium one, and the two round things on top a lighter one. But every time I change the shade of one part, it changes the whole thing. Blender seems to like joining different parts together and treating them as one - I'm trying to find a way to break it back down into the component bits, but so far the tutorials and articles I've found just don't work.

The only thing I can think of would be to actually have the bits sperate and have them float like 1 pixel away from each other, so they are differnet components.

I could perhaps colour them before joining them... that might work, but it would mean starting over.

Okay, after reading up on the Blender wiki I'm starting to get a handle on assigning colours. I've darkened the barrels and lightened the top round features, leaving the rest as a mid-grey and the rifter as a glowing red. I think it looks quite nice. Technically this is finished, as it matches the original picture now. But there are a few improvements I have in mind, if I can work out how to do them - like making the rifter so that it can swivel up and down to match the guns. Maybe adding some surface greebles I have in mind. And possibly make a firing version...

Firing turns out to be easy. Each beam is a very long thin cylinder, carefully matched up to the end of a barrel. Choose the material type "emission", which makes an object glow. Set colour to violet and put the brightness up really high, and job done. I like how it looks! Wondering if the beams might look better a different colour though. I always liked the blue phasers in TOS... may give that a go. And I wonder if there's a way to make a beam semi-transparent? Could give them a kind of "halo" effect around the beam if so.

Actually, the idea of an AMP (Antimatter/Matter Particle) cannon is that each cannon requires two barrels, one firing a matter stream, one firing an antimatter stream, and set so that the two beams converge on the target - this turret has two AMP Cannons, not four. So maybe it would be an idea to make the matter and antimatter streams a different colour? Have to think about that.

Incidentally, even though this turret is a "point defence" weapon, it's still pretty huge - a man would be about the same height as the diameter of one of those beams. These turrets stand almost fifty feet high, are seventy five feet across, and it's just over a hundred and sixty feet from the back of the turret to the muzzles of the cannon.

I must say, Blender is very confusing and rather counter-intuitive to begin with, but when you start to get the hang of things it's quite fun. Given that I've literally been working on the program for a day or two and am still stumbling along trying to work basics out, I think it's pretty cool that I can make something this good looking!

With blue beams. Also reduced the glow greatly so as not to wash out everything else.