Materials/ Wolfishness

Yup, you guessed it, more wolves.

I was asked (or rather volunteered) to create a logo for a friends' Band - Hour of Wolves. I took my original stylistic wolf, and added some more Flair and originality (and above all detail) to it, ending up with this:



due to the unanimous consent of the band being required, I have yet to hear feedback from the band itself, but the initial reaction from my friend was favourable.

Having done this, I decided to play about with some materials, discovering the 'smoke' effect was quite enjoyable!
Also discovered at this point was 3ds max's ability to render in higher-resolution, ?I thus chose to render in 'HDTV' mode, as that looked fairly good -
result: a resolution of 1920 X 1080 :-0

Unfortunatly, this is scaled down in both blogger and photobucket, so I will have to wait until I get on the 'Beast' to upload full-size images to my server.

anywhos, here's the scaled-downs (only 1024 X 768 :-) )









And here's a mock-up of the full logo (with the first wolf in this post)

Monty the Fawlty Python

Right,

I have decided to do something with my CAD suite other than sit around making funky pictures, well, motionless funky pictures.

my plan; moving funky pictures.

Or to be more precise, a short animated film.

The project is based around an animated snake [Monty] who is discontent with his environs,



the plot progresses for about 5 minutes from then onwards (I won't spoil it :-))

Dramatis Personae (so far):

Monty:


( a short test to see if the eyebrows work)


Manuel:

The Sea Wolf

Due to the presence of a new laptop, I felt the need to do a bit of Cad-Splurge. The dark one has some specular (hence why it shows up in the super-black). The Water one was more of a Laptop-test, as the material involved several raytrace passes and refraction calculation.

I am particularily pleased with the red eyes.

Here are some wolves:

I'm trying to gather opinions on peoples preferred materials, Could you please decide? Which of these combinations works best?

P.S. To see them in their full glory, please click on them :-)

Thankee :-{]

Phase 1 begins

As with all projects, an initial proof of concept CAD design must be created, prior to making the detailed plan (this is a 3d CAD blog after all).

Voila,

The cannon:


This cannon is to scale (in that the correct barrel-Chamber ratio is present)

Parts:
50mm PVC 5-bar piping (barrel)
75mm PVC 5-bar piping (chamber)
75-50mm reducer
screw-in 75mm bushing

Piezo-electric ignitor
Screws (for internal spark-gap)
Computer fan (to ventilate the chamber, for the effects of a fan upon performance, see here)
12v lead acid battery (to run the fan)
Key switch (safety for the firing)
Big red button (or something similar)


And here's a concept carriage mechanism (this is completly concept).


Right, on to the purchasing stage...

Experimental artillery

In the truest spirit of my educational establishment, I thought I would start a sequence of experiments into propelling objects to insanely high speeds before revelling in them impacting with great force into things.

Artillery.

The 'Masterplan' as it will now be termed, consists as follows:

Phase 1: Standard Combustion Potato cannon - A relatively simple, cheap design that uses the inherant power of aerosols to make a bang. (might possibly be on an artillery-style mount)

Phase 2: Similar to Phase 1, except the propulsion this time round will be by pneumatic means (and will have a lot more brass)

Phase 3: Utilising the experience gained in the previous Phases, I will attempt to create a Budget RailGun

Yes, A RailGun (it now has capitals to accentuate the awesomeness).

This happily ties in with the Phase 2 project in that it requires the projectile to be initially accelerated before entry into the railgun (otherwise it just spot-welds the projectiles to the rails).

Roll on the phase 2 machine!


Right, Phase 1 commences...