Forth Bridge

Still work in-progress, but coming together.

This is the Forth Bridge, a cantilever bridge built for rail traffic in 1890.

The 1st draft gets the basic shape sorted out,  I need to go back and add grunge and textures.

2d draft -  worked on the textures and a better water surface.   I managed to figure out a simple way of adding some mist to the background - I added a very large cube with a volumetric scattering material in the background rather than fiddling with the unintended near-field effects of applying mist to the whole scene.

  

Salvation Army Citadel, Aberdeen

The Salvation Army Citadel, an iconic building on Castlegate,  which can be seen the length of Union Steet in Aberdeen.

I have been wanting to model this building for a while. Apparently, the building it'self is based on the design for Balmoral Castle.  It certainly makes an impression.

There are a lot of iconic buildings in Aberdeen,  what to choose for the next project?

A wireframe of the model.

A google streetview of the location

Unleashing the Yes Engine

A follow-on from the Yes topiary.  This is getting quite a few re-tweets and nice comments on Twitter already.

Unleashing the Yes Engine.

And an animated version...

The date is named

This week we learned the date for the referendum on Scottish Independence,  some inspiration for some quick Blender work..

Mountain Loch - Revisited

I was quite please with my Mountain Loch image, and posted it to BlenderArtists.org. I got some really good comments back about the scaling of the trees v's the mountain and did some updates.  I also received some suggestion to try different focal lengths on the camera settings.

I am not a photographer and pretty clueless about the camera settings.  After a bit or research, I find that lower focal lengths give a wide angle, while longer focal lengths give zoom.  After a bit of experimentation, I have two new versions of the mountain scene.

Mountain Loch v2 - 90mm focal length "zoom"

V2 differs from the previous post in that I added lots more trees (about 500 for the scene) in an attempt to sell the scale of the (small) mountain.  The scene reminds me of the small islands on the west coast of Scotland more than some monster mountain.  It was never intended to be the Matterhorn :)

Mountain Loch v3 - 23mm focal length "wide angle"

The wide angle shot in V3 is very unforgiving on poor foreground detail,  I added some grass coming through the snow,  without this, your eye has nothing to settle on in the foreground and it is too easy to pick fault with the close-up parts.