A couple of years ago, after nearly 20 years of perfecting my 2D craft, I discovered the work of a Russian fellow whom called himself "600v" aka "Ixlrlxi".
He has all these wonderful retro-styled cars and was designing with the extremely easy to use 3D program: Google SketchUp.
His work is now found at http://600v.deviantart.com/

My 3D learning block was finally removed and I found myself on a quest to learn more.

Enter MoI3D!

Thanks to Pilou, a frequent at SketchUcation.com, I was lead to Moi3d.com and thus my 3D horizons broadened!

I have to say after some observation, there is a very exceptional level of politeness and mentor-ship here at Moi3D.com,
thanks much in part to the admirable attention and helpfulness of Michael Gibson.
Because of those qualities, this forum harbors a very conducive atmosphere to learning and artistic/design advancement that MoI is geared to assist.

There are a couple of other 3D designers that inspire me as well:
Jose Garcia aka "Cutangus" at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutangus/ and http://cutangus.deviantart.com/
And Alexey aka "Karanak" at http://karanak.deviantart.com/
None of those artists use MoI, that I know of. But, their stylings can be translated to a MoI workflow.

Of course, I have an appreciation for anyone's art works where good time and talent has been invested. Many reside at Moi3D! ;-)

Here, I'd like to pay homage to "Cutangus".
Jose is a designer of these great spider-legged tank concepts and fighter planes that seem to herald from a bygone era, attributed to the styling called "Dieselpunk", a related genre to "Steampunk".

His design method is based on the repetition of simple geometric shapes, especially spheroid and cylindrical solids.
His software of choice is Solidworks for NURBS modeling. He then perfects and renders his work in 3D Studio Max with post work in PhotoShop.
Before I discovered his use of Solidworks, I could note the tell-tale use of Fillets.

I have taken a couple of nights of free time and produced a replica of an eight-legged tank creation of his.

Because it is a replica of his device, though it is considered and independent work of parody, I'll only post screen captures of it here and will not proceed to render it or post it in the Gallery.
After all, it is only a pale replica.

Here is the source image:
I re-created this model by eye and making guesses on the proportions, while allowing for some natural variation.

To view the image larger, you must visit his site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutangus/319531813/in/photostream

The value I received from building this model were the four or five techniques I discovered or perfected, from Blending to better use of the Axis Rotation tool.
The complexity got to the point where I could no longer work on it on my home PC. (it only has 1 gig of ram and is at least 8 years old)
Note my use of some of my Lighting Options...

Here is my reproduction:

If you right-click and [view image], these will be twice this size...




















"Cutangus" says it's a tank powered by "decomposed hydrogen peroxide, with torpedoes on the front". From what I remember, this type of fuel was used in the German missiles that devastated parts of London during WWII.


And... Your work inspires me too, Pilou!!! Your images appear to dance with all the colors and patterns. ;-)




Thanks to all the other MoI designers that share their works, I study and appreciate them. Even I, a tutorial-maker am a humble student as well.

Very cool copy cat interpretation!
A futur tut ?
Maybe make the background with different colors for best visibility ?


Yes Ixlrlxi makes absolute terrific cars with Sketchup ! I am super fan!
See his tuts at http://www.youtube.com/user/ixlrlxi

I believe that Karanak use also sketchup :) He makes amazing Starchips with it!
You will find here the tut about that!
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=234083
By Karanak

Nice work Majik!

I see why we are both interested in creating grouped "Sub-assemblies" that move around and stay together as a whole - you have eight of them!

Yeah - MoI works well for me because the Booleans are a kind of a "machine shop" metaphor for me.

Boolean subtract is like a milling machine where I start with a big block of metal and cut away material.

Boolean add is like fusing pieces together with a TIG welder, but with clean joints :)

Revolve is like using my lathe.

And finally, I like to work with solid chunks of metal, rarely with sheet metal (surfaces) :)

Anyway, that's how I think of it.

Ed

Hey guys,

I get a malware warning when I want to open Karanaks page on conceptart.org?! Anybody else having this problem? Awesome stuff, btw! Reminds me of a moon rover I saw in a book about future moon exploration when I was a kid!

Yes, AVAST! said it blocked something bad. But Karanak's tut page is out of this world!

Conceptart.org is the biggest forum of art!
Some navigators or anti virus are some overzealous!

<<Mike:I re-created this model by eye and making guesses on the proportions>>


you got an "eagle-eye",Mike !!!
catching proportions is not easy..but you have this gift,a natural talent:you can draw with the pencil too..you got" the hand"(bad translating from Italian)
you changed the wheels from original:great job !
It turned out much...much..more better than original

> Conceptart.org is the biggest forum of art!

Yes, this is where I first found "600v".
I was looking for "vintage cars"... the next thing I knew, I was going to Google SU's site.


If anyone is interested how I make such smooth-looking screen captures above,

I use this script:

script:var v = moi.ui.getActiveViewport(); if ( v != null ) { moi.view.lineWidth = 4; v.renderToClipboard( 6800, 4800 ); moi.view.lineWidth = 1; }

Notes on the script: 1) If the "rendertoclipboard" dimensions of "6800, 4800" is too large for your video card to handle, you may notice that nothing will copy to the clipboard.
Just reduce the amounts. They are independent of your video monitor's current pixel dimensions. It's like a viewing from a "virtual" monitor.
2) The ".linewidth=4" is what the clipboard will see. If you are going to copy a view that is multiples in scale larger to what you will reduce it to in a photo editing program
keep the desired larger width in mind.
3) The ".linewidth=1" is what MoI will return to... caution! This number will become your new on-screen line thickness size. So if it was not set to the default of "1",
you'll need to find your desired number listed in the .ini file and use that one instead.

I paste the image into PhotoShop and then I re-size the image to something much smaller. A 4:1 ratio is often adequate.

PhotoShop uses "Bicubic Interpolation". All of the jagged and pixelated surface edges in my models appears to smooth out.

Which gives me an idea Michael,

Could something like this be done in the memory resident background whenever you stop manipulating the viewport.
When you stop moving in the viewport, MoI would take a screen image of the view, except at a larger size (4x), re-interpolates it to original size, thus smoothing out the un-anti-aliased edges, and then inserts it back into the viewport.

Just an idea for future though. ;-) But that might be one way to produce nearly flawless, anti-aliased viewport displays.

As you can see above, MoI already has some of the best viewport lighting out there!

Thanks M!

Actually, those are wheels he also uses in other pics... I think. ??? I had to take a guess at how he made them.

The eagle-eyes were hewn from blood, sweat, and tears.... ;-)
Years and years of good practice, taking clients poor quality source art and re-producing it for garment imprinting.
Reproducing thousands of fonts and corporate logotypes in just minutes to meet production deadlines will train you to perfection.
No arthritis yet...
You learn to get it close the first time before a client gets frustrated at you. ;-)

The thing I don't know how to do yet, or have the software to do is UVW unwrapping and perfectly painted and realistic surfaces in the render.

Mike, Awesome and inspiring!!! Thank you

Hi Mike it turned out really great - what a nimble looking machine and I love all the detail in the wheel structures!


> Could something like this be done in the memory resident background whenever
> you stop manipulating the viewport.
> When you stop moving in the viewport, MoI would take a screen image of the view, except at
> a larger size (4x), re-interpolates it to original size, thus smoothing out the un-anti-aliased edges,
> and then inserts it back into the viewport.

This is something that's more likely to get implemented as just an option to activate the built-in Direct3D anti-aliasing mechanism which then just essentially renders all content with more samples similar to that.

It's a little finicky to set up because support for it varies from card to card so I have to make sure to properly query the card to see what its capabilities are. I do expect to figure that out at some point.

- Michael

Thanks kindly guys! This one was fun. :-)

Wow !!! Wow !!! (And then, Wow again... :D )

"After all, it is only a pale replica". Really... well, "Sir, I beg to differ..."
That is 'magic' indeed (pun intended) !

Thank you so much for sharing this one! This is inspiring for someone, like me, who is just beginning with MoI. Gotta love all those details... the model is superb! Maybe a tutorial on those four or five techniques ? Just saying ... :)

Keep up your good work. Please...

Cheers,

Joao

Well, I'm flattered with that sentiment, Jpargana!

I'll consider the tuts.

Mike

Hey That looks really cool Mike.
Funny I have this vehicle webpage in my favorites for many years now. I planned to remake some of the vehicles wit Moi Myself. Never got the time for it to do so.


Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

PS: awesome spaceships by the way..

Mike, When you have a moment, can you give a step by step guide as to how you optimize your image after it is pasted into photoshop, I am lost.
PS I am using a 4 year old Macbook laptop 1280 x 800 is about as far as I could push my card.
Thanks in advance.

I got tired of using mesh modeling for hard surface objects (especially when it comes to high poly meshes). Currently I am looking into either getting Google Sketchup or MoI 3D. Which one would suit my needs, objectively ? (I would like to do kit bashing also, and then use boolean to join all the pieces) Thanks.

Hi motorsep - SketchUp is more oriented towards architectural kind of boxy-form modeling. If that's the kind of thing you need to build then it could be a good fit for you.

If the models you want to build have some more curved shapes to them, then MoI is usually a better fit for that since the method that MoI uses (called NURBS modeling) can make true curves instead of only line segments and polygon facets.

I would encourage you to spend at least some time experimenting with both yourself though.

- Michael

Both are really fun! The common point is the learning curve and facility!

And with Artisan for Sketchup! http://artisan4sketchup.com/ ( 39 $ it works with the free version of Sketchup! )
You can profit of the ergonomy of Sketchup + the perversion of the Subdivision! :)
And if you want Boolean for free Sketchup: http://www.smustard.com/script/BoolTools 10 $ by the same author! ;)

So with Sketchup + Moi you have the best of two worlds for a minimum of efforts and headaches :)

From the manual of Artisan (French by me :D (No Moi here! ;)

Well, I am certainly going to have more sci-fi forms with my upcoming project than crude architectural forms. Weapons, armor, mechas, some small space ships, etc. I would certainly like to use MoI in architectural modeling for certain elements that will be incorporated into the game levels. I know I can do it all in Blender, but I am certain that MoI should have faster and more natural workflow when it comes to industrial design so to speak. I recall reading an article where NURBS were suggested as a proper tool when it comes to non-organic tech objects modeling.

I will definitely play around for trial version of MoI. One thing I am wondering about if I can get model out of MoI into OBJ file so I could retopo it in either Blender or Topogun and bake normal/AO maps in xNormal afterward ?

I guess I saw quite a few vids of people making some cool stuff in Sketchup and I haven't really seen videos of people doing the same in MoI. Therefore I am wondering about its workflow.

Oh, and I am wondering if MoI comes in 64bit flavor for Windows and if Linux version will be coming any time soon? Thanks.