I'm betting on it to place in the fourth race.

Fix that glaring license plate and you are good to go.

Here in Arizona we are loosing the war on the environment. Tomorrow the state legislature is about to vote in a law that would make it illegal to follow any of the UN environmental guidelines. Another vote is being taken on exploiting four areas as radioactive waste recycling plants. The patients have taken over the mad house. I hate to cry "the sky is falling but maybe it is."

My neighbor lives in the trackless wilderness of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. This might seem strange as I live in Southern Arizona, almost in Mexico. Sam is in his mid nineties and lives across the road from me when Southern Arizona is somewhat cool, which is winter when Northern Alaska is solid ice. He waits down here for the ice in his lake to melt allowing a float plane to land. The float plane then deposits him and his eighty-year-old wife (he is a cradle robber)next to the lake for an Arctic summer. It is an 80 mile hike from the nearest native village. Aside from living with few outside dependencies, Sam hunts, lives, and writes books about living and hunting above the Arctic circle. I will share a quote from one of his books because it is relevant to SketchuUping, "Idea comes from the Greek and Latin meaning form or model. All that remained (referring to the hoof prints of migrating caribou) to mark the snow was an 'idea' of their passing."

It will be a long summer waiting for Sam Wright to return from Alaska given that at his age he might not return and I have a lot to learn from him. But I bought three of his books on the assumption that when the temperature in Arizona gets over 115 degrees F, reading Sam's books about the Arctic will be a cool thing to do. Isn't it a cool thing to know that "idea" and "model" are so closely related?

@gaieus said:

Almost a week ago, my wife (Mike knows) came home with a (4-m-o) puppy who has only three legs. Some photos of her on Facebook (as she already has a "fan club" and Facebook page).

All "text" (comments and such) are of course in Hungarian...

Tripod?

This was my Christmas Card for 2009. That is "El Duque de Ahwatukee de Hawkins y Payares" on the left. He is really a dog of the people in spite of the royal pretensions and just answers to "Duke". The dog on the right is "ceramic" and like many dogs likes to "hang" around trees.

Excellent renders are renders that are hard to see something to find fault with. In this case the only thing that bothers me is the close up of the tea pitcher. The index of refraction of the glass does not look right in the handle and neck and handle of the vessel. You see right through them as if they were just flat glass. My eye was expecting some distortions and stronger highlights. Does this happen of the inner and outer glass surfaces are not sealed together and the surfaces act as two pieces of thing glass rather than one piece of thick glass? Or is it just a case of not assigning a proper index of refraction. Glass is something I have struggled with from time to time.

Dave, use your imagination and design something to help these folks out. Let me know when you post the render.

What are you putting under this structure?

Todd, Roger over here in Tukee. Lower the rectangle until it touches the ridge of the structure. Draw a line on the rectangle along the top of the ridge to split the rectangle Then use the protractor tool to tilt the two halves until they touch the surfaces of the structure. Repeat the procedure where the vertical sections start.

Even better just use the ruler tool and measure the structure then do the math.

@allanx said:

Nice shot, looks like a work of art...

Thanks for sharing,

allanx

I think it is . . . . a work of art.

A pitch roof is covered with a black tar coating. A pitched roof tilts at an angle above horizontal.

I have some naughty textures.

A little rough but you get the idea

turn on hidden line

Post that little segment of the wheel as a small model. I would like to see what I could do with it.

Well someone created a much needed angle dimensioning tool that worked as I describe.

I tried 123D Catch to create 3D objects from a set of photos. It worked great on a difficult example (an elephant sculpture) and bombed on a simple geometric cube. I feel it might be my workflow is incorrect or their interface sucks. When time allows I want to revisit it and sort out the blame.

By the way, nice models.

The choices I see are soften the line, create a quarter tube and tilt to fit and patch it in carefully, drag a fillet profile down that valley with the follow me tool and patch the ends, or use some specialty plugins that may or may not be expensive.

Now that I dig under the surface this become more interesting. I just drew two circles within each other and used the dimensioning tool to obtain the diameters. They are both accurate at any point on the circle (vertex or not) as long as you don't explode the circle. Also if you dimension the circle at any point and then explode the circle, the dimensioning does not change. Now I wonder if you could create a special ruby that allows you to click between the inner and outer vertex for a correct board dimension and the apply that dimension anywhere on the circle when you make a third click on the circle. Said differently, the first two clicks determine the correct distance and the third click will attach that dimension to the circle at the point of your third click. I think we may have invented something usefully similar to the angle dimensioning ruby. Anybody want to write the tool?