@plot-paris said:

... rather high poly, isn't it?

Yes. But I'm still working on how to do organic models at all, so I'm not too worried about the poly counts. All of my stuff is just for fun, as I'm a hobbyist user of SU, not a pro.

I liked Solo's red glass loveseat so much, I decided to try a red glass Indigo render on the Hummer:

It would make a nice bit of garden art...

@unknownuser said:

Beautiful.

How much gas does that hummer consume

Thank you all for the kind words.

As to how much "fuel" they use, we get lots of hummingbirds at our house in the summer months. At the peak times, we have three 4-station feeders going, and they usually have to be changed twice a day. We are gradually switching to 6-station feeders to handle the traffic.

Here's my most recent feeder shot, taken last summer after a sudden hail shower (note the hail on the deck surface in the background).

My latest try at organic modeling with SU and SubSmooth is this hummingbird.

I tried some textures, but didn't have a lot of luck. Here's as far as I got:

I imported a feather picture and stuck it on the side tailfeathers (which are all instances of the same component), but I couldn't get it to cover the whole component (the white parts at the top aren't supposed to be there). I tried a wing feather, but I couldn't get that to work at all. The rest of the material is just stock colors and a "scale" material.

If anyone wants to play with it, here's a zipped copy of the skp:

Hummer1.zip

Very nice. I wouldn't be surprised to find it in a Half-Life episode...

From my backlog of projects, another sailplane files off the blueprints:

This is as far as I'm going to go with this one. It was another learning exercise, and I think I'm going to stick to organic forms for the next couple of projects. They're more interesting.

For anyone who cares, this is a Blanik L-13. It's a two-seater, and it was made in Checkoslovakia. I owned one of these in the 80's, and gave many a glider ride to friends and family.

@malaise said:

Do you use scientific features to model ? ( bones size, footprint...)

I may get to the point one day where I can create "scientifically accurate" models of creatures, but for now I'm still working out the nuances of using SubSmooth. The models in this thread are inspired by 2D illustrations.

As far as the process involved in creating a model from a flat drawing, it's fairly straightforward. The obvious one in this model is to create a flat outline on the 2D image of the Tylosaur, extrude it, sculpt the resulting blocky shape until it looks like the proxy shown, then run SubSmooth on it. SubSmooth is where the magic happens (thanks again, Whaat!).

When the proxy has been smoothed, then I fuss with details until I come to a reasonable stopping point. Another view of the smoothed and detailed model:

And thank you all for the kind remarks...

Another SubSmooth critter from long ago. This an approximation of a Tylosaur.

This is the progression. I used an original Charles R. Knight illustration for the dimensions, created the proxy in the center, then subsmoothed it and did a bit of fussing with the result.

Actual size of this critter was 44 feet long...

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted...

Thank you, sir!

She appears to be made of post-it notes...

@unknownuser said:

Neither did I. Do you mind me asking the reason? Not looking for another atheism vs. religion discussion, I'm genuinely intrigued.

Probably because of the caffeine. I drink coffee because of the caffeine, but I used to work at a company that had a large contingent of Mormons, and they couldn't drink anything that contained caffeine.

Nice folks, though...

Retro futurism refers to predictions of the future from the past. Numerous examples exist on YouTube of videos created in the 50's and 60's of what life would be like in the 21st century, most of which are wildly wrong. No one is good at predicting the future.

I happen to have this example of some retro-futurism of my own. I did the drawing for a Christmas Card in 1976, showing my idea of the future of the department store Santa. Thirty years later, I used it for a training aid while learning Xara, and recreated it as a vector graphic (I posted that in the "Hand Drawn Art" thread in the Corner Bar on June 11).

Now, I've recreated it with SketchUp. It's not a perfect copy, as I found that my hand-drawn perspective was not reproducible. And the file got so large that I didn't attempt to add the boy, the sign, or Santa's hat to the SU model, but cloned them from the Xara graphic onto the exported jpg.

As with most retro-future predictions, this one was way off. The technology is silly and the department stores still have the traditional Santas. But it was just for fun, anyway...

I have an Intel CoreDuo 6600 WinXP SP3 machine with 2GB, and a 256k GeForce 8600GT. I've not had any issues with SU performance until recently, when a model I've been working on for a while began to display jerky responses to repositioning instead of smooth movement. I checked the file size, and found that it had exceeded 10 megabytes.

My model is currently at 12mb, and has become sluggish. I'm guessing that 13 to 15 megabytes will be the largest model that I can process with this configuration.

I used to draw incessantly when I was young. I wanted to be a cartoonist at one point, but I became distracted by computers when I found that I could actually earn a living as a programmer (this was in 1965!), and that most cartoonists are starving.

My pencil and ink drawings have long been replaced by computer graphics, but I still have an example or two of my earlier stuff. Here's my vision of the Department Store Santa of Christmas Future as the front of a Christmas card I did in 1976:

And here's a vector graphic I did of it a couple of years ago in Xara X:

Obviously, I need to do a SketchUp version, and make it a trilogy...

Playing with the lighting...

Thank you all for the kind words.

I'd love to "show the proxy" for this guy, but there were many proxies (one for the head, one for the torso, one for the leg, one for the foot, etc.). It was an assembly job -- I made individual parts and knitted them together. I'm still experimenting with this plugin, and I didn't keep anything.

Here's the .skp, zipped.
UtahRaptor.zip
I have one tip to offer (so far) about making SubSmooth models. The actual smoothing process appears to proceed along the green axis. Any rotation of the proxy will give you a slightly different result, so do a bit of testing to get that "just right" shape.

Taking a word of advice from Solo about trying something you're not sure you can do, I started this dino last weekend. One great thing about SubSmooth, you can make individual parts over and over again until you get them right. One bad thing about it -- it's difficult to stop fussing with it.

So this is an arbitrary stopping point. I'm about fussed out...

Clark,

Thanks for this! Sometimes the simplest things are the handiest.

I'm also used to having a 15-degree rotation in other graphics programs, so I cloned your 90 to a 15, and it works a treat.

@mateo soletic said:

Great work Teezer.
How did You get that terrain looking so good.
Did You do aply postprocess in Sara?

No post processing of the landscape -- it's a screen grab from Google Earth. The location and altitude were actually selected to represent a personal flight taken in April of 1977.

Thank you all for the kind words...