picture of the original and the 3D editor
After finishing my bachelor thesis in the summer of 2012, I had time to relive an old hobby of mine, Designing 3D-Models with the computer. This time I tried to create a model that was supposed to look as close to real life as possible. As a gift, I had been given a pen that I really liked. So I decided to create that one, as the design is really interesting: The whole pen is made of light metal, while most of the shaft is brushed metal, which gives the pen a good, tangible feeling. The other parts are shiny metal, so all in all the pen looks elegant without being too posh.
While designing, trying to make the material look in the computer as it does in real life can be a hard time. To get the right look, I observed the original in various environments and under various lighting. The original looked best under direct light in a natural environment. That might well be because the natural environment has a lot of variety. The metal of the pen reflects a huge amount of its environment, so an interesting enviroment makes the reflections on the pen look interesting.
The picture of the final model is thus not rendered in a completely gray environment. In fact the process of making the picture is much more like taking a photo inside a room, where the walls of the box are painted with a panoramic picture, yet the floor is completely gray. And this is what the final picture looks like:
the final model and its parts
As one can see, I created only the visible parts of the pen. Other parts of the original, e.g. the spring, interconnecting parts or mechanical parts don’t make the pen look different on the outside, that’s why I didn’t model those parts.
I later used this pen together with a model of a name card to create the title picture of this website.
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