Dinoreplicas doodles

[Strick67]

Received my Ceratosaurus skull 3D prints

Also got started on my new PC build. It's a fairlymodest spec, a 6 core AMD Ryzen 5 APU with 16Gb Ram.
The old mechanical hard drive is temporary, got an M2 drive coming this weekend but I want to test this now.

It should mean I can finally move on from Blender 2.79 and onto the newer versions. Might add a proper GPU later.
The case was donated by a friend. I had to replace my previous desk and my old Antec 300 case is too tall for the new one. Might keep the case if the cooling is adequate.

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

The 3-D printed skulls look GREAT!!!

 

[Strick67]

The 3-D printed skulls look GREAT!!!

Thanks, The white one is 1:8th scale and the grey is 1:10th. I haven't painted one of these for ages and I'm a little nervous about it. Probably try a bronze effect for the smaller model.

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

I am looking forward to seeing how they turn out! I wish you the very best of luck with the painting.

 

[Strick67]

A few more photos before I paint these, jaw articulation seems to work well. Both prints are nylon material, the white one is Selective laser sintering process and The grey is multi jet fusion.

 

[mijob]

That looks great and verry real. You are doing such a great job on all your designs.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The results are spectacular! I think it is a big advantage to print fossilised bone models. Any visible print step can be disguised as part of the design.

 

[Strick67]

That looks great and verry real. You are doing such a great job on all your designs.

Thanks.

The results are spectacular! I think it is a big advantage to print fossilised bone models. Any visible print step can be disguised as part of the design.

Thanks, these cheaper SLS and MJF prints from Shapeways are more grainy and the print lines are minimal. More expensive resin prints should be more detailed but might show more prominent lines though I haven't tried this yet. As it is I think it helps to show potential buyers that the cheaper processes produce decent results.

Few more photos, I'd better get painting this week.

 

[zathros]

Just a quick question, you're pulling the cube into shapes with "Control Points'? I saw the video, but a lot is left out. I am in awe of your work, and that you 3D print is Nylon is excellent.


I just finished a Ryzen 9 5800 series, water cooled, MSI MoBo, with around 5 Terabytes of storage. It's water cool, big radiator, never get hot. I have an M2 SSD, incredibly fast, but you can't defrag them, as it puts a great strain on them, so they don't end up being as fast as they were when they were new. I think these SSD hard drives have a definite short life. I only run programs on them and back up everything to the optical drives, I get about 5 years out of them. I also installed an "M" drive, which is considered "Archival" meaning they should last at least 1000 years. The discs were expensive though, but the smaller ones hold 25 Gigs of data. The larger capacity discs can hold 100 Gigs. The prices have come down substantially. They can be read by Blu-Ray, but need a "M" disc writer to write to them. It is write only. They can still suffer everything a regular CD can, but they will not delaminate, so if they are stored securely, much data can be stored away safely.

My PC:

 

[Strick67]

Just a quick question, you're pulling the cube into shapes with "Control Points'? I saw the video, but a lot is left out. I am in awe of your work, and that you 3D print is Nylon is excellent.

Thanks, my current method is a bit convoluted and mult-step-

• I make a rough 'scaffold' sculpt, I usually approximate the form first but any shape could be used to start this off.
• When I'm done with that I form a low-poly model over it. After paint sketching a rough layout for the topology I build this poly by poly in an empty object using face snapping to place vertices on the surface of the scaffold. The form can be tweaked by moving the vertices.
• Once this is done I add a multi-resolution modifier, subdivide it a few times and sculpt the details on it.

Now I've got a spanky new PC I could probably drop the multi-res section and make these things as medium/high poly sculpts but I've always liked the subdivision modeling approach.

I just finished a Ryzen 9 5800 series, water cooled, MSI MoBo, with around 5 Terabytes of storage. It's water cool, big radiator, never get hot. I have an M2 SSD, incredibly fast, but you can't defrag them, as it puts a great strain on them, so they don't end up being as fast as they were when they were new. I think these SSD hard drives have a definite short life. I only run programs on them and back up everything to the optical drives, I get about 5 years out of them. I also installed an "M" drive, which is considered "Archival" meaning they should last at least 1000 years. The discs were expensive though, but the smaller ones hold 25 Gigs of data. The larger capacity discs can hold 100 Gigs. The prices have come down substantially. They can be read by Blu-Ray, but need a "M" disc writer to write to them. It is write only. They can still suffer everything a regular CD can, but they will not delaminate, so if they are stored securely, much data can be stored away safely.

Really nice PC, I'm quite envious.

Not too concerned about SSD longevity but I fancied trying one for OS drive, it is faster than I'm used to. I have friends who rave about boot and app startup speeds but these things have never been an issue for me. Having said that with my previous (14yr old) desktop, I used to turn it on then go and make a cup of tea while it was booting .

Assembled and painted these wooden toys with the grandsons

 

[zathros]

My hats off to you with Blender. I just couldn't figure it out. I found Rhino 3D far more intuitive, and since I make arts for vehicles, boats, etc., I needed something I could use with dimensions. You're models are fantastic, and the 3D printed ones are fantastic. You have Blender all figured out. I would have to go through a step by steep tutorial, I tried that on YouTube, but I guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

 

[Strick67]

Painted the Ceratosaurus skulls yesterday, still need to make a stand for the big one.
Now I'm rushing to finish the photos. Wouldn't mind putting the model on Shapeways tomorrow, going on a family visit but I might get it done later in the day.
The hot pink background paper worked OK, going to add a bluish vignette round the edges.

 

[Strick67]

Finally done with it, got the model up on my 'side hussle' and the first pics up on Deviantart, just about to jpeg a few more.
Painted with acrylic, the bone effect one is 1:8th scale and the faux bronze is 1:10th

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

That looks AMAZING!!!

 

[mijob]

wow this looks so relastic a verry good job well done.

 

[Strick67]

A few more pics of the Ceratosaurus skull

 

[Strick67]

Thanks to the new PC I'm finally able to move on from Blender 2.79 and have a play with newer versions, in this case Blender 3.2.

Thought I might have to buy a GPU but for the moment the Eevee renderer seems to work OK on my CPUs built-in graphics, these screen-grabs were done with Eevee but the results are similar with Cycles. The first thing I wanted to try to make was planets!

This was the first attempt at a rocky planet material I've tried to put everything into one BDSF shader. The atmosphere is a separate sphere containing clouds and cyan rim glow.

The node graph for this is pretty simple (it's my first go). You can see I'm using procedural noise to drive a bunch of colour ramps. I'm using a clamped B&W ramp to make the continent mask. There's a second component to the land part that adds the mountain ranges.

It was hard to get a good transition between land and water, more so when zoomed in. The second attempt uses 3 materials in one shader (5 if you count the mixers), a BDSF for the land and a simple diffuse/glossy mix for the water. This time the mask is separating shaders which gives a better specular transition. The land bump is too pronounced but it's less noticeable when the clouds are present. The clouds are a bit stretched, I was trying to get a wind-blown look.

Here's what it looks like without atmosphere. The V2 land has 2 tone (forest & desert?) lowlands with raised grey mountains.

The nodes are a bit more convoluted for this one. I'd still prefer to have everything within one shader in the material. probably baking to image textures is the way to go for surface details but I'd still need to use angle based effects for things like atmosphere glow and dark-side city lights.

 

[Strick67]

Fire Ant scribbles
Pencil on A4 copier paper. Going to try making one of these critters in Blender

 

[micahrogers]

a modern critter... cool.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The node graph for this is pretty simple

Absolutely...



I bow before anyone who is able to produce a render from Blender. I tried it once and failed miserably. Seeing those node tables is absolutely incredible.

I love your painted skulls. They look metallic and in the pictures they do not look like models but like CG renders. WOW!

The fire ants immediately remind me of that one scene from "Scorpion King".