Object Design Shenanigans and Occurrences

   

to begin designing this set, I did a handful of initial thumbs for the pawn, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the most important piece for establishing the aesthetics of a set. I decided on a low-poly aesthetic, using actual humanoid figures rather than totally abstracted pieces. Right away I knew this would be a massive undertaking so I decided to design the set in such a way that I could re-use much of the geometry between pieces.  These were the first two models where I established exactly how I was going to approach this set, The pawn and both of their faces had a quite a few flaws in construction that I would later revise in the final set, but otherwise they provided a strong baseline to make these pieces involved a heavy amount of lofted shapes and manually joined planar surfaces. I found I had to do the majority of the problem solving directly in 3D to get the results I wanted, and it was rather tedious work, you have to be very careful in making sure all of their ...

This project was fairly straightforward and a much needed break from the tyranny of the soldering clamp For me, the early iterative process of any problem is probably the most interesting while my sketches tend to be rough, I tend to pretty thoroughly lay out ideas I think would be interesting, and try to have a mix of feasible concepts, as well as totally off the wall ones, such as the working pepper mill ring. The great part about putting crazy ideas to paper is that sometimes they lead to other good ones, that didn't happen this time but oh well. There's also a random doodle there because I got bored Ultimately I decided upon the lego ring, sword ring, and cylinder ring To design this, I laid out the basics in 2D, but compared to previous projects I did a lot of the shaping in 3D; I wasn't 100% sure exactly how I wanted all the pieces to look and be proportioned, so I found the experimenting directly with 3D tools let me get more immediate results, that's ...

Finally finished with this project, there's still areas I would have like to polish more, but the clock is up so here we are. Overall I'm happy with how this came out, every problem that I didn't quite have time to resolve is a problem I'm absolutely confident I could fix with everything I have learned so far, which I think is a good place to be in terms of having unresolved little issues. Now, on to the renders, this particular object doesn't have a whole lot to take apart, however it is quite dynamic and changeable, so for each render I manually re-arranged the parts to get different looks and to try to make something as plain as a soldering third hand fun to look at it, hopefully I've succeeded in that to one extent or another. This object also turned out to be a fortunate pick in that exactly the textures I wanted for it were already loaded up.

I had really hoped to get everything done by the end of this week, but unfortunately these final pieces are taking significantly longer than I thought. To start with I finished up the wingnut, which doesn't look correct at all, I focused way too much on using boolean tools and it made the whole thing very disagreeable. Time permitting I am going to revise or redo this one entirely I decided to drop the wingnut for a while as it was frustrating me to no end, and move on to these screw with the flat faces, they came together relatively quickly, I discovered working on these that sometimes if a boolean or some other tool is being disagreeable on a small scale, increasing the size of the object will often allow the various functions to go through, and then you simply shrink it back down to the size you need. To get the final detail of the transition of the screw threads into the head of the screw, which is not a dead stop, I created a little planar surface to shear off the e...

This week I primarily tackled the base of the third hand, It looked very simple, but I was astonished by the amount of trouble it gave me, there was many subtle problems. The first I had to account for was that incredibly uneven texture, which meant I had to be very choosy about where I took my measurements to maintain accuracy to the overall form of the object. I started with a simple base made of squares and trimmed the unnecessary pieces, despite appearances, the object is not symmetrical, a good reminder to always double check every thing. the top of the object is slightly smaller, so I simply reameassure and then lofted the two together I constructed the upper piece separately, as I thought it would be easier to layout in 2D from the front view rather than the top view. I almost forgot that the backside of it was angled, so I quickly constructed a angled piece and boolean differenced the excess away Filleting the edges of this monster was an unbelievable nightmare, the en...