Warning sign/label generator

Today I stumbled over this interesting webpage which you can use to generate your own warning sign textures. Unluckily the version I was looking for was not generatable...


http://www.warningsigngenerator.com/
http://www.warninglabelgenerator.com/

Here's a version I created:

Modeling a clone tube: Modifier setup

Currently I am in the process of modeling a high-poly sci-fi cloning tube to further advance my modeling skills. Yesterday I started with a simple, blocked-out setup to test the modifier setup. The method to flip an array around an empty looks very promising. You can learn s.th. e.g. in Blenderguru's car rim modeling tutorial: http://www.blenderguru.com/how-to-make-a-car-wheel/

Here's my blocked-out setup with modifier setup. The base tile was created from a circle (here with 8 vertices) from which later on 7 parts were deleted. Array rotation in Z is 45° (360°/8). For better modeling it makes sense to set your outer edge of the tile parallel to the Y or X axis (rotate tube&empty around curser at center)

Another improvement, if your tile is mirrored, would be to add a further mirror modifier around Y or X as the first modifier:

New model: Oriental pearl tower

Yesterday I finished my recent model, a medium detail version of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai. Currently the complete texturing is missing, that's why actually it looks really CG like. Here's a bottom to top zoom:



A very useful tutorial I used is this parfum bottle tutorial from BlenderNewbies. It teaches you how to effectively use Blender's array, simple deform (blend mode) and shrinkwrap modifier. The only change I made was that I used on the simple deform (blend mode) the value of "2*pi" which gives you an exact complete 360° circle.

Shape Modeling Exercise #5 - Wrapping an Object with a Lattice-style Mesh: http://www.blendernewbies.com/tutorials/25/net_wrap/netwrap.html

Fun with matcaps

This evening I took an indepth look at matcaps - and asked myself if I ever will need HDRI maps again.

Result of this evening (license is CC BY SA, matcaps by SEspider):

 There is actually no lamp in the scene, all light comes from the matcaps. Model is suzanne with three levels of subdivision.

Great resources that I used:

- Tutorial: Use of matcaps in Blender: from blendernewbies: http://www.blendernewbies.com/tutorials/25/zbrush_matcaps/zbmc.html
- Ben Simonds' matcap generator for Blender: http://bensimonds.com/2010/07/30/matcap-generator/
- Matcaps from SEspiter: http://sespider.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2vixyb

New model: Welding robot

Finally I finished this weekend my welding robot (currently on the way to blendswap):



Currently I am in the process of updating the welding tongue (finding a good reference image isn't easy :-)):

One of the most difficult tasks was to get the nice rounding of the turret. At first I tried sculpting, which was with the grab/draw/smooth brushes efficient, but defermations with the lattice (which I tried afterwards apparently) provided not only a quicker, but also better solution: