Posts made by bjornkn

Looks great with the new prop

@hellnbak said:

although with it's undersized wings it might also need a warp engine)
Warp?
Sure you didn't mean a real Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trainplanepro/4396018980/

Of course you're free to shape the prop however you want to, but as you were asking for problems/errors...
Such props were typically tapered much narrower closer to the hub/root. And they were usually rotating in the other direction too (clockwise when seen from the pilot).
Here's a model of a plane quite similar to yours, the Sikorsky S-16: http://www.essmc.org.au/jonbuncess16.html

It could be calculated roughly with just a few numbers:
Like:
Expected income per year : $50,000 (a bit lower than average here in Norway)
Add 20% for expenses, hw/sw etc : $10,000 (may be more or less?)

45 weeks each with 20 hours work (don't expect to get work full time all year) : 900hours ea year.

$60,000/900h = ~$67 per hour.

You may set the h/week lower, like 10h? Then you end up with $130/h.
It is really a simple calculation. What is more difficult is to calculate how much time you're going to spend on doing the job.

For fixed price projects you'll need to know/calculate how much time you'll use for making the model + rendering and compositing.
Could you do it in one day or less, or would you need more time?
I typically calculate with halfday blocks (4h), and usually calc at least one day for a normal/small project.
As I also usually travel and photograph background photos (and often a HDR 360-probe/pano for lighting/reflections) that is calculated/added too.

Looks like a nice model
Good job!
But the prop doesn't look good/right.

Vyonyx is also a great source for cutout people and trees

If you google for "carbon fiber seamless" images you'll find tons of tileable carbon fiber textures.

@jolran said:

Maybe you won't find everything you want in 1 sole renderer? It's good to have multiple renderers...

And it is even better to have a renderer that can do a lot more than just render
I use LightWave3D as external renderer, and for modelling/adding objects that I couldn't possible make/add inside SU itself. As well as animation and instancing. Twilight works nice too, but then you're limited to what fits inside SU, and the control of materials is a bit limited inside SU.

Pretty extreme furniture you're dealing with
Are people really buying this stuff?

Good luck!

Also http://vyonyx.com/category/down/tex/ is great for textures, cut-out people/trees etc.

A program I've been using for many years, but still not often mentioned is Xara http://xara.com
It comes in different versions, and is a very fast and nice vector drawing program as well as capable of doing a lot of bitmap editing as well. Great for materials as well as all kinds of images, brochures, pdfs, Flash animations etc.
And it is also excellent for making great web sites, which looks pretty much identical in all browsers - which is not an easy task to do by hand

The first (and only) dynamic component I made in SU was a roof tile that would add more tiles when scaled, with the correct distance between them. It was quite a lot of work to make it though...

My suggestion is to make a very simple component of one tile (with no faces on the underside, which won't be visible anyway).
Use Move/copy to make a copy sideways at the right distance.
Select the 2 tiles and move/copy downwards at the right distance.
Make a new component of those 4 tiles.
Now you can easily fill a roof by move/copying inside the component/group, using the distances between two of the tiles as reference.
Lots of extra work on roofs that are not straight saddle roofs.

But I think I'd still vote for TIGs suggestion - make textures instead of 3D tiles...

When exporting 3ds to LightWave I always export in meters. Then you don't need to do any any scaling (or rotation) in LW.
I usually export selection only.
When there are changes in the SU model I just copy the new version into a new layer in LW, and all old materials that have been tweaked in LW are inherited automatically.
I always import 3ds into LW Modeler, and not Layout.
Most of the time SU->LW is quite trouble-free

There is also a LW exporter plugin for SU, but because it always exports everything in the skp model I don't use it.

You might also find GPSBabel useful for converting between different formats:
http://www.gpsbabel.org/

I guess this depends a lot on how you work?
As I typically leave faces/lines in Layer0 and put groups/Components on named layers I would never start messing around with temporarily moving them to a temp layer. I might make a temp group from a selection of obscuring groups/comps and then hide it, or put it on a temp/hidden layer. But I would explode it asap afterwards.

Using X-ray mode (but transparent materials will not) also helps sometimes, because it'll let you select/pick entities hidden behind other objects.
Once again - with shorcuts it is usually very quick to solve such picking problems..

Very nice work, and a great fit with the photo (except for that "Escher" tree on the left
How did you manage to get the reflection of the building on the roof of that car in the front, even in the SU version? Was there a similar, real building hidden behind the model?
Apart from that I think they look a slightly overexposed?
And some better glass/reflections and less repetitive bricks wouldn't hurt.

Great !
That auto edge-flip tool is very useful too

Great work
If you're going for full photo realism you'd need to add some subtle bump/normal/spec/dirt maps to those aluminium panels though.

I just found a suit of tools on Android Market: Smart tools toolbox:
https://market.android.com/details?id=kr.aboy.tools&feature=related_apps
It can measure distance, height, width, slopes/angles, compass (as well as dB and vibration!) etc..
Looks interesting, although I doubt that the precision can be very high..
Guess it's time for my first purchase on that market...

I thought you had an iPhone to test it on?
I did a little test with a similar Android app called GeoCam. It does show pitch/azimuth as well as roll, but it uses no decimals, just integers

@unknownuser said:

However I am even more eager to try out the TFI3D (SP?) product.

I suppose that would be Tgi3D? Or could it be something else?