Mark B. Tomlinson

I had some fun recently modelling some diverse computer components. It started when I spotted a Ryzen CPU online and thought it would be interesting to recreate it in 3D. Initially I created an SVG plan of the chip from which to model. After the CPU I decided to have a go at a little Solid State Drive. I have this on in my machine so that seemed apt. Finally and for no particular reason I went with a Floppy Disk, in this instance a three and a half inch version....

I started the new year playing with some image textures for my models, in particular metal and rust: Example maps used above As an example of some of the textures I made here is a Steel and Rust one used on the shader ball I made. If you wish you can right-click and download them and use them on your own work as you please: Base Diffuse Colour Roughness Metallic Height Comments are off on this site, if you wish to say something you are invited to do so via Mastodon

This year I went with a dark grey suit and hat, with the addition of a little colour in the form of the Christmas tree badge. Here is a copy of the Christmas tree in the SVG format, feel free to copy and use as you wish. Almost certainly this will be the last post of the year and so I wish you a peaceful Yuletide.

I haven’t posted at all this month, I have been busy though so to make it before December here is a little model I made at the end of last month: I don’t think next month will be any better, we will see…

Blender has nice newish shader node for doing Volumetric renders i.e. foggy, misty environments, called Principled Volume. The way I have been doing it recently is to add a mesh cube around the object in the scene, see the image below. Tip: it helps to set the Cube Mesh Viewport Display to Display as Bounds. The Shader connections are shown below, note the Surface input is empty, the only connection is to the Volume....

Blender Bevels come with a few options that are worth checking out before applying them. The interesting one for most use cases is the Miter Outer to change the spread pattern of the bevel on the outer edge. The default one is Sharp and is shown below: The second one is an Arc: And finally the Patch: Personally I like the Arc as it gives nicely spread out geometry around the sides and results in less shading issues....