3D model/render work on the 2.2T motor I'm building

[rwest]

Your rendering work is amazing. I particularly like the exploded rocker arm picture- beauty in simplicity.

[porschyard]

All i can say is wow, while your canvas and brush are a computer screen and micrometers you truly are an artist

[boyt911sc]

Glen,

I get goose bumps looking at your computer generated images. You are a genius in my book. Please continue making more of your master pieces. Thanks for sharing.

Tony

[hcoles]

In a previous life I used UG, later named NX. Your modeling is beyond impressive. As mentioned people probably would buy posters/etc.

[LIRS6]

Fantastic work - thanks for sharing!

Jason

[Optimusglen]

thanks guys! I've started trying out some animation within the rendering software I use. Just teaching myself so it's all very basic, but thought you guys might enjoy it.

[mr-72]

What rendering package do you use? vray, keyshot?

[Optimusglen]

Originally Posted by mr-72

What rendering package do you use? vray, keyshot?

Answered in the first post, Keyshot.

[todd230]

Originally Posted by 911T70

Again, beautiful work! At first I thought I was looking at my car (post #98) but my daughter tells me the colour is not slate grey, but some sort of green (I'm colour-blind).! What colour is it?

After seeing your renderings, I realized that the oil-cooler duct was originally grey. On mine, it's black with a lot of scratches, showing the grey underneath, and it looked terrible. I stripped it and polished it and it looks great!

My car is very close to this color - VW Sea Blue

[Optimusglen]

Some more parts added.

[911T70]

Gorgeous! Looking at it, I felt something was wrong and thought - 'OMG, he's made a mistake with the exhaust!'. I then remembered this engine goes into a 914, not a 911!

[Optimusglen]

Haha, yeah. I modeled the 914 exhaust first because I had a real set to build from. I do plan on doing a 911 orientation but for that I'll need to work off photos I find online.

[Optimusglen]

So it's looking like the case for my real 911/07 needs to be sent to Ollies, bummer but I suppose it was to be expected.

I've made a few additions to the 3D model, still so many details I need to tackle, and I haven't even started the throttle linkages.



If anyone is interested in an art print, I do have a few views up at society6.com/autoillustrated

[Eric at Pelican Parts]

Fantastic!! You never disappoint with these updates!

The animation with the rendering software is really cool. Do you have plans to animate the motor so it runs?

[Optimusglen]

Layouts for the heads

[Optimusglen]

[911T70]

So cool! A beautiful thing of beauty!

[Tippy]

Can I ask how big the file is now in data and what kind of hardware are you running to be able make such a monster assembly?

My laptop fully spec'd from HP can barely run fixtures I've put together and sometimes takes hours to convert files from customers.

[Optimusglen]

Originally Posted by Tippy

Can I ask how big the file is now in data and what kind of hardware are you running to be able make such a monster assembly?

My laptop fully spec'd from HP can barely run fixtures I've put together and sometimes takes hours to convert files from customers.

I have a bit of a hotrod laptop. What video card are you running and how much RAM?

After I create the models I export as step files. A step file is a universal true geometry format that can generally be opened by any model software, but it's a "dumb" model in that if I want to change a hole size from 10mm to 11mm for instance, I can't just click on that feature and change the value from 10 to 11 like I could in the native file. The bright side is that the step file is a bit more compressed than the native file, the engine/trans assembly is about 200mb.

When I import the step file into my rendering software, the import process converts the smooth round surfaces into triangles, this is called tesselation. I choose how much tesselation on import, the highest value of 1 breaks the surfaces into billions of triangles and thus extremely large files. For my latest image that one was brought in with a tesselation value of 0.15 and contains 30,500,000ish triangles with a file size of about 650mb which is manageable. Here's a shot of a valve cover showing the individual triangles.



The software does this because it needs to calculate exactly how much light is reflecting where to make true photo-realistic images. Higher tessellation values make for more accurate reflections because it's breaking the surfaces up into smaller facets and calculating each and every one for color and light.

I have some files that are multiple gb, but much of that is because I brought everything in with a much higher tessellation value earlier on in my history.

And applying labels and decals brings the file size up a lot too. This Martini 914 model with my engine model installed is 5.5 gigs. If I brought this up and updated the tessellation value I could likely bring this down quite a bit though.

[Optimusglen]

Throttle linkage done finally.