A long time ago in an uncomfortable chair relatively far away, I stared at my first Amiga. It was a 2000 with no hard drive because I spent all my money on RAM because with more RAM, impossible things became possible, but with no HD, you could still do the same things, but it was just slower (a lot slower). After seeing the “Juggler” animation I was hooked on raytracing and determined to explore.
To make a long, dull story longer and even more dull, I went to school for mechanical engineering. After graduating I found the job market at that particular time was nearly non-existent. So… I pushed my Amiga to do things it probably wished it never had to do and made a business of 3D animation. I eventually joined a small production house and spent nearly two decades there. On the side I made a business of WWII aviation art printed on canvas. I started with Imagine, graduated to Lightwave, and then to Softimage. I loved Sofimage but it’s days were numbered. Things were good for a long time but as always in this life, nothing stays the same.
I ended up resurrecting what I thought was a long dead career in engineering using mostly Solidworks and Inventor. I had always wondered what modeling in a solid modeling system was like, and after what seems like a million hours doing it, I think I have all the info I need on that subject.
Engineering does a good job of paying the bills but it can be tedious, stressful and rather dull at times. I miss visualization and raytracing in particular. That led me to start a long and casual look for a replacement for Softimage for the day I retire and have the time to do what I want. I finally decided Blender is definitely the one for a whole lot of reasons. I really do like it, especially cycles.
I figured I’ve hung around this forum long enough I better start a sketchbook and get started. So here goes…any tips, hint’s criticism, etc. most welcome. Don’t worry, I have a thick skin. I like to learn.
This is the first thing I’ve done for fun in Blender. I did a few industrial animations I’ll share later learning only what I absolutely had to know but this is for fun.
This is a watch I originally modeled in Softimage, my very favourite watch. I wanted to get used to lighting, texturing and rendering (since most of my modeling will likely still be in Inventor for the near future). I was never thrilled with the original render in Mental Ray. Cycles is astounding to me with it’s nearly instantaneous feedback. Something we could only dream of in Mental Ray. Just a few hours of playing around and I already like it a lot more than the original.
I haven’t calibrated my monitor so let me know if the levels are off. Comments most welcome! I need to do some work on UV’s and a few details to start for sure.
I had seen Smoke Studio and it looked like so much fun I had to try it and this was the perfect excuse to play with it. I like this a lot. Let me know what you think. Cheers to a new adventure!
Here’s the original from Softimage:
