My recent doodles

[Technocracy]

Take a peek and bear in mind I'm an engineer not an artist



This first one is my attempt at a "textbook" cover like image.  I found it entertaining to listen to the comments when I slipped it onto a few people's machines at lunch.



This is another "texbook" style but with a different slant.  I used the quotes, and I use that word loosely, to resemble the reviewers comments you see plastered all over any book nowadays.



The last one is one I did this morning instead of working.  I find that I need a large amount of motivation to be productive at work so while I waited for my motivation to show up I did this. I was torn between calling it "Interruption" and "The fun of flexible morality".

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

I like the last one, what did you use to make it? Also, have you ever used Blender?

[agent compassion]

What do you mean you're not an artist? Those are way cool.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

I kinda think that engineering is an art as much as it is a science, or at least it is sometimes.

[Technocracy]

For the first two images it was strictly a Photoshop image built in layers with a "plastic wrap" applied over a gaussian noise field.  The last one I built the scene within Bryce.  The IMI Desert Eagle is a model from DAZ and the Book, Calipers and Magnifier were models from Runtime DNA.  The eye, pyramid, tiled floor and sky were all done with procedural textures inside of Bryce.  The final image was rendered with Bryce.

The software I use in my doodles includes Photoshop 6.0, Bryce 5.5, Poser 5, DAZ Studio, Blender, Wings 3D and a few organic grass creation tools I found on the internet.  I went out and bought the software a little bit at a time and learned as I went along.  I use Solidworks, a 3D package in the Catia family, professionally to design heavy equipment used in material handling so I was comfortable with 3D design just not from an artistic standpoint.  The stuff I have to do for a living has to line up dimensionally to thousandths of an inch and it is quite a mental departure to deal with abstract 3D like Blender and Wings.  I keep the software on my workstation at my office so when I feel undermotivated I can do something creative to take my mind off of bolts, sheet metal and the like  

Here is another from my collection of wasted time or time well wasted, however you want to look at it.  I need to get around to making myself a fancy dancy avatar to use in here but I haven't had any ideas yet

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

That's pretty cool too, you make that with Bryce? (How much did Bryce cost by the way?)

[Technocracy]

When I bought Bryce it was at version 5 and was around $70 if I remember correctly.  I would have skipped buying Poser if I had known that DAZ studio is free to download from the DAZ website and does basically the same thing only it has native export to Bryce capability so the object model textures are associated properly on import.  There are some better natural world generation software packages out there like Vue but they are a few hundred dollars so you'd have to be pretty serious about it.

Here is a couple of more from my archive of pics.  The first is an image I used when I was playing WoD (World of Darkness) games like Vampire/Mage .  We used it on a message board game to set the scene and get people in the creepy mood.  I don't like to point out flaws others might not notice but if you look at the rifle I have leaning against the wal inside the barn you'll notice the shadow doesn't tough the end of barrel meaning the model is actually not leaning against the wall but a little bit in front of it against thin air.




The next is one I did for someone to shrink down and use as their avatar.  The idea was to have some funky polyhedral dice on a picnic table.  He wanted the name to look like it was embossed onto the table.  It turned out ok but it still looks unfinished to me when viewed in large format.  As an avatar the lack of other details isn't as obvious.



[Edit] Oh and yes the globe was a purely Bryce 5.5 work.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

That's pretty damn cool, how would you say skills in Blender transfer to Bryce? I was thinking of practicing more with Blender before I decided whether or not to get Bryce. Right now I'm saving up for Photoshop CS2 and a sexay 10-22mm wide angle Canon EOS lens.

[Technocracy]

Well Bryce is primarily a natural landscape and lighting studio.  It excels at creating realistic terrain and lighting.  It can handle vegetation reasonably well with its built in tree maker but it nothing compared to Vue when it comes to rendering 1000s of trees.  As for comparing it to Blender they are really two different animals.  

Blender is a jack of all trades that has probably the most difficult interface to learn I've ever run across.  It is very powerful but I just find it too clumsy for most work.  I prefer to use Wings to model in but if I had to buy a model package I'd grab Silo from Nevercenter.  For $109 it has a super smooth and fast interface that works better than any of the more expensive "all in packages" when it comes to making models unless you are into NURBS or something.  POV-ray is really powerful but I find it tedious to set up so I use Bryce to render my stuff in.

The pro level packages all offer cheaper entry level stuff now so that for a few hundred dollars you can get really nice tools.  It really boils down to what  you want to do.  Blender will do everything but finish render so for free software its tough to beat.  However programs like Silo make modeling so easy than its more fun than a chore, which is what modeling in Blender always felt like to me.

[edit]  I forgot to mention that Bryce is only really capable of boolean modeling(add/subbtract/union/intersection) so it really can't be used for modeling unless you are a glutton for punishment.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Aah, see one of my friends from highschool was big into bryce and he'd always send me these cool alien looking landscapes (now he's in an insane asylum, or whatever they call them now). The only real reason I play with blender is because its free, heh. Same reason I use Gimp for photo editing (although eventually I'll have to break down and get Photoshop CS). You know of any other free/opensource programs like this? Either for Linux or Windows?

[Technocracy]

Well for landscape creation there is terragen http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

There is a modeling and rendering studio called art of illusion that runs in Java http://www.artofillusion.org/

This is a directory listing tons of pay/shareware/open source/freeware 3D software of all types, modelers, render engines, vegetation applets, etc.
http://www.3dlinks.com/

If you want to see why I don't call myself an artist check out http://www.cgsociety.org/ The stuff on there exemplifies why I'm a hack compared to real artists

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Cool, thanks man. And just because your work doesn't stack up to the stuff at http://www.cgsociety.org/ doesn't mean you're an artist. Those people look like they do that as their profession, but I'm sure they didn't start out like that; everybody's got to start out somewhere. I'd stick with this shit if I were you. If I were you I would also use your body to break into top secret government buildings, steal their secrets, and use them to fund the CRSF... But that's another story..

[ataraxia]

Top Secret stuff is boring and outdated. They use big words with small meanings. And everybody has to code in C - or older stuff. On mainframes. Let them keep it. (And my former co-workers will thank you for not trolling up their day jobs.)

Some discordians know the truth about the government...  :P

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

What's wrong with C? I thought everyone was still using C++ for a ton of things...

[Technocracy]

I don't sweat the whole pro vs amateur thing.  For me its just a way to blow off steam and have something to show for it when I'm done.  I'm a tad old to be thinking of a new profession and I've find doing what you like for money often ruins the experience over time.