Old Coffee Table

Modeling -- Old Coffee Table

Toy Helicopter

Console Table

Quick render of the console table I mocked up in Rhino. It's been soooo long since I had actually done a rendering, it was like playing with a whole new program again. Fun, but frustrating. I had to poke around the render settings because I couldn't recall at first which tweaks increased the output quality. A lot of "well was obvious" type thoughts kept running through my head. (:

I should probably have made sure the obj export had each of the boards as a separate object...once the meshing occurred, it looks like they somehow got joined together. Which is fine, but since I couldn't change the texture on each individual board once I pulled it into Carrara, the texture for the wood is going the same direction on each piece. Whoops.

Export Settings From Rhino to Carrara

This is what I get for not trying to render anything in the last three years. (Coincidentally, that's around the time I had my little boy. Hmmm....)

For the life of me, I didn't understand why my obj file from Rhino was, well, invisible in Carrara. After all kinds of sizing and moving it around, I realized I had just exported it wrong. It was NURBS instead of a mesh. Oops. So, note to self, these were good export settings out of Rhino:

Modeling -- Console Table (Experimenting with BooleanDifference and Scale)

In the past, I had a tendency to use one little square unit to equal one inch when modeling in Rhino. The reason is simple--I have a lousy sense of depth perception, so if I draw everything very carefully to scale, then I can just move things around and trust that the perspective is correct. One unit to one inch seemed like a reasonable enough thing to do.

I've had trouble in the past with the Fillet Edge command, and hadn't put much thought into why. So when I started working on the quickie console table idea, I wanted to take chunks out to represent possible joinery in the wood. Splitting seemed like the obvious thing to do, until I started poking around at commands, and had duh moment that BooleanDifference would be more appropriate.

Only it didn't seem to work for me! No matter how carefully I aligned things! I checked all the possible problems that seemed most obvious, and really had no idea how to get it to work. The idea of splitting and then rebuilding all those surfaces individually sounded tedious and silly.

I stumbled on the answer accidentally while perusing the Rhino forum on R'osity. I don't post there much, and lurk fairly infrequently, but I was skipping through the posts when I saw it mentioned that scale can affect a lot of commands. Well huh. That made a lot of sense, as I thought about the geometry at a high level.

So I decided to retry the console table, from scratch, only much larger. And...what a surprise...both the fillet and boolean operations worked easily. Sheesh. Now I feel silly for having been doing it the hard way all this time!


Dimensions:

36" length
20" deep
32" tall

Experimenting with Solid --> Fillet Edge

GIMP and Transparent .gif

Earlier today I was playing with GIMP a little bit, and was experimenting with how to create a transparent gif. I'm terribly unfamiliar with GIMP, and although I could do this in about five minutes in CorelDraw...I'd like to learn more GIMP stuff anyway. (:



In the Layer window, I selected Layer - Transparency - Add Alpha Channel. (If this is blanked out then it's already been done.) This makes sure your image can store transparency data. After that I used the paintbrush to create the dog. When saving I selected Indexed on the first screen, and then on the next screen checked the 'Interlace' option.

Modeling -- Child's Table and Fish Tank

Modeling -- Living Room Couch

Note: Possibly rebuild pillow surface?

Modeling -- Dining Room Table

Modeling -- TV Armoire