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Home 2008
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This website is a log of my hobbies, passions and projects. It will hopefully over time fill up with helpful advice to
encourage, inspire and guide others with similar interests. rab by the way are my initials Robert Andrew Burke
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| December home/2008:
Towards the end of last month I decided to to start a project to help
me learn some of Blenders Animation Tools and more specifically the
ones that can be used with mechanical modelling. Constructing the rig
for the back actor of a JCB has been a challenge, but that's simply
down to my lack of knowledge of the tools and techniques. Once I had
read up on the tools and knew a little about what I was doing, the rig
went together without any problems. I wish I could say the same for the
front bucket rig, it looked simpler at first but incorporates a lever
mechanism to stop the bucket tipping back to far when the main arms are
raised. |
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the moment I haven't found a way of automating this movement, but I am
hopeful that a solution will eventually be found. I have started a Work
in Progress
thread for the JCB on the Blenderartist forum where you can track the
progress of the project. A description of the front mechanism problem
with diagrams is also on the thread, so any helpful advice on how to
automate the bucket movement would be appreciated. When I have finished
the JCB I intend on adding a Projects page to the Graphics section of
this site where I will put a making of article detailing some
of the new tricks and techniques I have used, that might be
useful
to others that are learning Blender. |
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November: One
area of Blender that I haven't had much experience with is its
animation capabilities. As animation is probably the main purpose for
Blender, I thought it would be good to have a go at rigging and
animating, though with a bias towards animation of machinery rather
than characters.
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There's
a lot of information on the internet on setting up constraints for
mechanical rigging and a very good tutorial in the Blender
2.3 Guide
which is still very relevant. The problem I found is most of the
information is based around setting up a simple Piston and Cylinder and
there is very little on anything much more complicated. It seems all
the
discussion on Blenders armature system revolves around its use
as
skeletons for characters, rather than the constrained movement of
machinery. |
As a project to allow me to get to grips with armatures and constraints
I thought it would be good to have a go at modelling an excavator's
back actor. Most of the constraints are based around Piston and
cylinders tracked between simple pivoting arms. There is however a
complicated fulcrum arrangement that allows the bucket to rotate at the
end of the excavators arm. As a starter I have modelled 2 dimensional
shapes of the excavator to help me set up the constraints, I can then
add the 3D models when the
animation rig is working correctly.
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A Few Tips on Mechanical Rigging
with Armatures
1.
Where possible use constraints on the objects rather than
armatures.
2.
The root and Tip of the armature can be snapped to the exact rotation
centre using blenders Alt-S
snap menu (Cursor>Selection Selection>Cursor).
3.
Work aligned to Front, Side or Top view.
4.
After aligning bones in Edit Mode remove the Bone Roll by selecting the
bone and pressing Ctrl-N.
5.
Lock Bone axis that you don't want to move in the Armature Bones panel.
Edit Context, Pose Mode.
6.
Lock the axis of the bones and Object in the Transform Properties
panel. N.
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October:
Its
good to see yet another release of Blender, now up to 2.48
with
some great new features and substantial improvements to the game
engine. One small modification worth a mention is the improvements to
the Boolean Modifier, the results from a few trials I have carried out
extracting the face of Suzanne from a subdivided cube seem to work
faultlessly. With these results Boolean operations can play a much
greater roll in
speeding up the modelling process.
I
haven't yet got around to finishing off the 608 Bearing video
tutorials, but I did find a little time to add a 5 part tutorial
constructing
and texturing the gear opposite.
The tutorial covers the basics
of creating a gear model with the help of the Blender Mechanical Gears
script by Stefano Selleri. Unwrapping the gear into a UV layout.
creating an image texture for the metal grain and adding embossed
lettering to the gear. Hopefully there is enough information
in
the tutorial to allow you to use the techniques on you own models and
add that extra bit of realism to to the final technical illustrations.
Link to Gear
Tutorial |
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September:
This
month I have completed my switch over to Ubuntu Linux and have been
more than pleased with the ease of which I was able to get it setup.
The graphics glitch mentioned last month was simply down to the fact
that I had got the Extra visual effects turned on and my old graphics
card couldn't cope. Switching back to no effects cured that problem (thanks for the pointer Terry).
Also getting my MIDI keyboard working was a lot less painful
than
on Windows and the amount of quality music creation software that is
available for Linux is unbelievable. The only problem I am finding now
is that fact that there are so many new things available to explore and
play with, I am not finding the time to continue with any of my current
projects. Hopefully in October I will regain a little bit of discipline
and get back to completing the video tutorials for the 608 Bearing.
Whilst I was clearing out my hard drive I came across an old Blender
key framing and alpha wipe animation test of the Chimney Pot
Chess
Set and uploaded it to Vimeo. |
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August:
Because I have spent a lot of my free time this month getting my PC to
duel boot Windows and Ubuntu Studio, I haven't had much time to do
anything with the Web Site. Rather than rushing something to add to the
site I decided to post a couple of pieces I have been doing at work for
the new Flue products brochure. Matching a 3D model of the flue and
wall into an existing stock photo was the biggest
challenge, estimating the cameras focal length and position
takes
a lot of trial and error. Both images were created with Blender and
post processed in Gimp. I will post a link to the brochure when it is
completed and uploaded onto the Red Bank site. Being completely self
taught in graphics I am pleased that my work is now of a sufficient
standard to be included in commercial projects.
Ubuntu turned out to be completely pain free to install, its been my
first success with Linux. There are a few issues to overcome but I am
confident my home computing will soon be on a totally Open Source
setup. The main issue I have at the moment with Ubuntu is that the
Blender render window sits behind the main blender screen, when I
Alt-Tab it to the front it doesn't update or crashes Blender. Its
possibly something thats easy to overcome, but being a complete Linux
novice, I haven't found the solution yet. If anyone has any pointers I
would greatly appreciate any help I am given.
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Both the images are posted in the Gallery and have been included with
kind permission of Hanson Red bank.
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July:
What a
hedache this month has been; things were progressing nicely over the
last couple of months, all my pages had been transfered over onto the "UNLIMITED
BANDWIDTH"
Web host I now subscribe to and I was busy recording a few of
the
608 Bearing Tutorials, when WAM without warning my site was
taken
down by the host. After a couple of Emails and Phone Calls it was
explained that on 30th June there had been a bandwidth spike of over
5.48 GiB in 1 day and it was all coming from the pdf Guide. I
had
to remove the guide from the site before they would reinstate it.
Unfortunately my google stats and server side stats don't show any
spikes in traffic, just a steady flow totalling 10.2 GiB for May and
7.26 GiB For June and google stats showed only 2 downloads on 30th June
and 23 on 29th June. So the host scores 0 out of 10 for customer
service. As a hobby site Its more of an inconvenience than a
major problem. Had I been running a business from the site it could
have been very costly, imagine having a successfull advertising
campaign and finding your site taken down at the most
profitable
moment. Hopefully this will act as a warning to others, you dont always
get what the glossy front page offers and check the small print. My
provider states If they cannot handle the bandwidth they will
take
the site down and offer a full refund. Hardly unlimited.As a
footnote the Precision Modelling Guide is back online for now at my
Internet providers space.
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| Thats enough moaning so on to the
positive stuff. I have finally found time to do some personal
Blending. With the release of Luxrender 0.5 I thought I would have a go
at a simple scene and see what difference an unbiased renderer would
make. As I am using an old computer I kept the scene simple just 3
coloured glass tumblers and left Lux going for 3 days whilst I wasn't
using the computer. There is still a bit of noise in the image but
Luxrender shows great promise and is developing at an incredible
pace. |
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| Although
still at an early Beta testing stage Luxrender appears fairly user
friendly and easy to learn, it's well worth checking the renderer out
if you are interested in making high quality unbiased renders. More
details can be found on www.luxrender.net. |
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On the back of
the tumbler image I thought it would be good to try out a more
complicated engineering type ilustration, unfortunately the gearbox
workings were too complicated and I was unable to get them into Lux. As
a first stab I have
rendered the gears using Blender with the new Glossy
Reflections
feature which has worked well. This will be another model I come back
to when I have a faster computer. |
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June:
I hoped
to achieve a lot on this site in May, as usual something else got in
the way. Work commitments became all to serious with the UK solid fuel
appliance manufacturers, HETAS, SFA and the Renewable Energy
Association asking me to make the Industry presentation to the
Governments Industry Advisory Group for the 2010 Building Regulations
changes. Needless to say the presentation was graphics orientated
rather than the usual text and talk. In all around 30 hours was spent
of my own time researching and creating the presentation, time I wanted
to spend on this site. Still I did manage to bring over the remainder
of the pages from my old domain and give them a face-lift.
This
month I decided to try my hand at producing a few video tutorials
and I thought it would be good practice to port the Precision Modelling
Guide to video as well as the .html and .pdf versions. Its becoming
real mixed media learning experience for anyone interested in this type
of modelling. The video tutorials are embedded at the bottom of the
corresponding web page. I would be interested to know if
anyone
found
them useful, or if my dulcet tones were too much to bear, comments in
the guest book will
always be appreciated. Whilst I have been working
through the video's I noticed that some areas of the guide have become
out of date compared to the new features in Blender 2.46, I am slowly
updating the web pages with the changes and when finished will add an
updated .pdf guide.
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I
haven't managed to complete any personal Blender work for some time
now, however I am using the program more and more at work. This month I
have produced a number of graphics for use in Hanson's sales literature
and it sounds like there will be more to come.
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May:
I have now brought all my tutorial pages over to the new host, so
hopefully there are no more redirects back to here. I have also added a
Guest Book
for anyone that would like to leave a comment, criticism or suggestion
for the site. also anyone who needs help or advice with the tutorials
can post their requests in the Guest
Book. The permanent link to the Book is via the tabs
above. |
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April:
This has been a
really busy month for me,
my site was getting close to filling up the available space allowed
from my web provider and after finding a 3D viewer that I wanted to use
on my site, I found my provider didn't allow JavaScripts. So this month
I have bit the bullet and paid for proper web hosting. Rather than
just transferring my site to the new host I decided to give it a face
lift and in the process learn a little bit more about CSS and HTML
With the
work of moving the pages of my old site still progressing,
some of the links from the tutorials section will be temporarily
redirected back to this
page, I hope it doesn't cause too much inconvenience. Next month I hope
to complete the migration of the tutorials sections and possibly start
adding a few new video tutorials.
The 3D viewer that my web provider wouldn't allow is the "3D No
Plugins" viewer from Thorsten Shlueter www.thoro.de. it
allows you to take a series of images of your model which can then be
rotated on the web page using your mouse.
Click the link opposite to load a model of the priory arch which you
can rotate .
Once loaded the model can be rotated horizontally and vertically using
the left mouse button.
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March:
Seeing I haven't done much Blending since finishing the Placka Image in
October last year and with
the release of 2.46 imminent; I thought it was time to get into another
Blender Project. With the 2.46 release candidate 1 available on the
Blender website, It's will be a good opportunity to start a
project
that used some of the new tools and features, so this month I have set
about learning how to use some of them. The scene I am
contemplating will be based on an old ruined Priory a few miles from
where I live. Some of the stonework is still standing but very
decayed.
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I am modelling the stonework with the
detail it would have originally
had when carved by the masons hundreds of years ago then, I
will then carve out the
erosion with the sculpt tool. You may be thinking there is nothing new
in that, but I am using an old slow computer. To make it work I am
limited to about 750,000 vertices so I will need to sculpt each stone
individually and then bake a low |
 The
only remaining archway of the priory and its surrounding stonework |
polly normal map from it to use in the
final scene. Blender 2.46 rc1 supports baking of tangent space
normal
maps from a high polly mesh to a low polly mesh allowing you to create
large detailed scenes even with limited hardware. |
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| Sculpted
High Polly Model |
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Low
Polly Model |
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Low
Polly Model with Normal Map |
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As
a rough first trial the left image above shows a basic high polly
sculpted stone. The centre one is the low polly version without any
detail and the right hand stone is the centre low polly model with the
normal map added. These are just a rough first trial the finished
stones will contain a lot more detail and have a painted diffuse map
that will hopefully produce a convincing decayed stone feature. |
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Another addition to Blender 2.46 worth
mentioning is the transform widget. Until now modelling
with it has been limited to dragging, rotating or scaling by clicking
on a handle of the widget and moving the mouse to affect the transfer.
After a request by me on Blender Artist theeth (one of the Blender
coders) has added numerical input to the widget, allowing it to be used
in precision modelling. This combined with the new Custom Transform
Orientations feature will be a great help for parts modelling, allowing
you to model in the 3D view at any rotation, rather than confined to
front, top or side view. So a big thanks goes out to theeth for these
features.
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| February:
Firstly a big thanks' to everyone who has commented on the Precision
Modelling Guide, the feedback has been really encouraging. Those of you
who have emailed me pointing out a few of the typos and errors that
were included in the first upload of the Guide, your proof reading has
been invaluable and I have updated the guide several times, adding the
corrections as they have been pointed out to me. The Guide is
now
on revision 005, so if you haven't got the latest version with Robert
Burke 005 on
the bottom left of the cover page, you might want to download the
corrected document. |
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With my
workshop becoming a bit more organised, I decided
to concentrate a
little more on adding tools and equipment to use with my furnace. As
its no good having the capability to melt aluminium if you can't cast
it
into anything, I decided to use the boards salvaged from an old
wardrobe
to make a Cope and Drag. As usual the design was worked out using
Blender. For those of you not familiar with casting, a Cope and Drag
are used to retain the sand in a sand casting mould.
The parts list and basic assembly of all the components are detailed on
the Foundry
page.
The cope
and
drag worked well on a trial mould and casting. As the year progresses I
have got plans to make a lot of components and many will need basic
castings, the cope and drag will no doubt be put to good use. From this
basic design I have made a number of different sized copes and drags.
All of them made for free from salvaged materials. |
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January:
Its the first anniversary of rab3D this month and I must admit the site
has come a long way in the last twelve months, much further than I
first thought it would. To everyone who has commented on my work over
the last year, either in the forums or by Email I would like to extend
a big thank you. Your encouragement has helped keep me focused on
extending the sites contents and making this a useful resource.
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This
month however I have decided to veer off course a little and share some
information about another great free program I have found and started
to play with. I suppose it is related to a degree with people
interested in designing and making things because as creative people
that creativity can also spill over into music. The programs called
Buzzmachines and it's a computer based modular synthesiser. It opens up
the possibilities of creating just about any type of sound or music
directly on your computer, you don't even need a music keyboard
as you can create music directly from your computers qwerty
keys. As a
modular synthesiser it means you can add sound generators and effects
with almost unlimited possibilities. Once you have created the sound,
you can build up patterns of notes that when sequenced together become
your music. |
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It may sound complicate but like Blender once you
make the
effort to get over that first hurdle (understanding the concept) the
process of making music in Buzz becomes very intuitive. I have added
some links to Buzz and a few of the sites that offer tutorials and
advice on my links page. As a new user I can't do the program any
justice but it's worth checking out some of the music demonstrations on
youtube to see just what this program is capable of. (Youtube Link 1) -
(Youtube Link 2) -
(Youtube Link 3) |
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| My reasons for
searching for a music program dates back to an accident I had a few
years ago which needed a 5 hour operation to reconnect tendons and
repair a knuckle in my left hand. The surgeon made a great job of the
repair but passed the comment that I probably won't be able to play the
piano again. I don't know why but whenever I am told I can't or won't
be able to do something I have to have a go to see if I can prove them
wrong. |
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So for Christmas I had a Midi Keyboard, which
through Buzz and various plug-ins can
be made to sound like almost any instrument available and I am steadily
progressing through keyboard tutorials.
As far as Blender or engineering projects go, this month I have started
to reorganise my workshop, moving out all the left over building
materials stored there whilst I completed the house
extension. I
can now get to my CNC router, which I must admit is in a sorry
state. having
completed the design for the CNC rebuild, it just remains for me to
make the castings and machine the new parts to get the machine
operating efficiently. I will post more on this as I start to cut metal
later in the year.
Last month saw me complete the Blender Precision Modelling tutorials,
it ended up being a lot more work than I first intended but it has been
well worth the effort. After being on the web for only a few weeks, the
Precision Modelling Guide has been downloaded by over ten thousand
people. This coming year I intend to concentrate more on
materials textures and lighting, so keep a look out over the year as I
may be adding a few more Blender tutorials. |
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All Content © 2007 - 2013 Robert Burke, unless otherwise stated.
Please contact me if you would like to use any of this content.
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