Back when I was a kid I absolutely loved Darda cars — the kind of toy cars that wind up by pulling back. There are plastic tracks that you can build and the cars would go around those quite fast. Awesome stuff really.
I remember building the craziest setups with jumps and the lot. So much fun for a crazy kid! I also used to modify the cars by shaving off weight and painting them. Another funny way of playing with them was to race them in the bath tub — some quite amazing stunts were achieved that way.
A while back, for nostalgic reasons, I bought a couple of cars via eBay. Just to have as a little retro decorative piece. So I’ve had them sitting for a while just looking cool, but the other day I got the idea that I’d make a 3D model and some renderings out of one. Fast forward a few hours and here’s the result. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. The whole thing is probably 95% accurate with only the internal mechanism missing.
Since I’m a geek of big proportions, I just could not stay away from getting the new iPhone 4. I downloaded the iMovie app and tried it out. Since I have not yet had a chance to record some real video, I just made a little presentation with some images I had stored on the phone.
Bokeh is the word for the blurry areas in a photo with a short depth of field. Here is another rendering I made where I wanted to see how it turned out with really short depth of field (or a lot of bokeh).
Click the long thumbnail for a preview. If you happen to want a bigger size, click here: 1440 x 900px
On the big size you can actually see the “Simple Bike Co.” text on the bearing seal.
Again I was playing around with some 3D images and came up with these two variations of the same theme. Simple blocks with letters on them. Played around with rendering different materials and angles and these are the two I’m the most satisfied with. I’ll probably add more of this kind of content as time passes.
Since I made these in the 1440 x 900px size they can be used as a desktop background (if that’s your resolution), so they’re available for download on the downloads page.
Past few days I’ve been playing around with doing some photorealistic renderings of stuff I’ve got CAD drawings for. This one turned out really nice although I got the focus a bit off. Was really cranking it with the bokeh (the blurry out-of-focus areas) with short depth of field.
Only six more hours to render a new one… haha!
Adding another one… This time I’ve been trying to play around with transparent materials. Not really as realistic, but it’s still close and way better than any other renderings I’ve done before.
