3D model of an ebike

 

Its been a while.  

I have been working and practicing.  The latest personal project was modelling this ebike.  I wanted to do a more complicated modelling challenge and this one certainly delivered.  

It took quite a while and I eventually had to decide on an end point so did not quite get to the level of finish I had thought I would but it was diminishing returns as I modelled smaller and smaller parts.  

I used geonodes to make the chain but had to apply it to animate the chain. Could not figure out a way to animate it otherwise.  The chain was on a curve constraint. 

To animate the bike I used the rigacar addon but only applied it to the two wheels. 

I used drivers for the cranks and pedals 

After working so hard on the model I wanted to work with it and took a few different approaches for animation.  One was a 2D /3D mixture. I painted grass and sunflowers on different layers and then animated the growth cycle in Blender importing the .[ng s as image layers.  The animation was edited in DaVinci Resolve.  

    I have had an Adobe cloud subscription for the past few years and have always felt I was fighting the software- the constant fidely updates and crashes meant I had pretty much done all my Photoshop work in CS6 of late.  As for Premier Pro I just never got comfortable with the work flow.  So rather that paying upwards of €750 this year I bought DaVinci and the Steam version of Substance Painter and still had change leftover.  So far I am impressed with DaVinci. 

The other animation was on a stage in Blender where I animated the rig and played alot with lighting. 

The final animation

A breakdown of the animation

You can see better quality on my website here https://dertypaws.com/archives/portfolio/e-bike-3d-model-animation/

Landing on Planet

 

                                                                      Landing on Planet

Hello and welcome to what became the most challenging piece of Blender work I have created so far.  

This was a commission and that is what stretched me as I could not give up when things got challenging. If I had known how big this project would get I would have probably passed.  The reward was all the new stuff I learned along the way.  I wanted to do it as I knew it would push me out of all the lowpoly work I have done and towards realisim.  The other big draw was   ... its space. 

It started off with a storyboard.

Then a landscape which I ended up modeling as I needed some specific features.  It had to be not identifyable as Moon or Mars. 

Planet Landscape

For the planet scene I used the resource made available by NASA  https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4720.  Changed up the colour a little. 

Moon Shot

Next were the vehicles of which there ended up being 3.  

The lander had to have a few moving parts and I would have done a proper rig on it in hindsight but it ended up being  wheels parented and a driver on each wheel.  

Lander rigging

The next vehicle was the cleanup vehicle.  This had to have a few specific features so I made it to order.  On this one I did rig the wheels as the vehicle had to move in circles.  I used rigacar to rig all 6 wheels. http://digicreatures.net/articles/rigacar.html .  This is a fantastic addon with great instructions.  I had not used it before but it was great and easy to animate using a follow path modifier.   The big disappointment on this vehicle was the laser.  I wanted to use a different approach to render but rendering time was limited so I went with a basic solution.  

Clean up Vehicle

The final vehicle was the spaceship which was deliberately non descript.  It was a simple design.  The dificulty on it was adding  the smoke and heat.  This all ended up being parented.

Space ship landing

Thats a summary of the major assets.  

I will go through some of the more complex effects in the next installment.  If there is something in particular you would like to know more about drop a note on Twitter. I am planning on creating some YouTube videos to go in more depth on those.   

Municipal Services

 

City vista

This was a big project and went through a number of iterations before landing on the final look.  

The brief was from an Engineering Company Vista Engineering.  They wanted to include notable buildings in Reykjavik alongside the services they provide for marketing purposes. 

To try include so much in the single scene they wanted was the challenge.  The starting point was way zoomed out.

Then we moved to a grid like structure - ignoring actual geography. 

The early drafts were going to include some sea.  

It was taking up valuble space and needlessly constricting where buildings were sited - so it is ditched.

After that the how to depict each service was worked out.  This version had the pipework above the ground plane. 

In this draft I was playing around with how to illustrate the information on signs and displays

Then it was into fine tuning details and timing. 

And finally locking in look and render settings.

Stay Safe

 

Stay Safe

I worked on a commission a while back for https://beeganassociates.com/ and created an animation for it.  The brief was to prompt people to think about their health and safety at work in broader terms.    For time reasons I ended up using a protion of it. I worked on it afterwards to round it out.  

The hazzard signs were in illustrator.  I imported them as .svg files and then animated the camera. They were the last addition. 

The stick man animation was done first.  The timing on it was slowed  for this version though it still moves along at a fair lick.  I used the lights to change scene colours.  

Music was CC 4.0  "Wants to know" by Soulsurfer.  

 

Salvage

Data Mining

Vimeo link

This started out as a commission but the client wanted to go in a different direction after the initial sketches. I think the fact I did the concepts in 2D threw them.  

For me if the final image is a still 2D image then the approach of using the photoshop sketches is stronger but I should have thought of the client who was invested in a 3D image wanted to see that format in drafts.  

Anyway I was left with a partially developed concept that I did want to finish.  

I had developed 2 colour schemes based on what I could see of their branding.  As the choice was now mine alone I went with the lighter one. 

I used a toon shader to keep the detail low for the data centre.  There is a toon shader built in for Blender but it only works with cycles.  To keep the lighting effects I wanted to stay with the Eevee renderer.  You can cheat a toon shader using ramps so I used a variant of MrTriPies method here 

I added some animations.  I added ripples following the tutorial by Gleb Alexandrov here .  This method uses the wave modifier, dyanmic paint and a particle system.  The major time investment here was in getting a material and lighting set up that would leave the data lake emissions  visible but still being able to see the ripples by reflection.  

The figures are on the basic metarig.  You can see the lighting ended up a little complicated but that is why I wanted to do the lighter scene as it is harder to control.  

Lighting set up