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.

Links:

manufacturer’s Website

In 2010/2011 a friend of mine, who’s a photographer, asked me to refurbish his website. Our aim was to give focus to the pictures and only provide slim information, so as not to distract from the pictures. The programming for controlling the gallery was individually done for this project. It took several development cycles until the desired result was achieved. During this period software-testing with a number of people helped us get from our experimental prototypes and scratches to the final gallery.

a picture of the final homepage

It took about four months from the first paper sketches to the final site, with most time used for diverse versions of the gallery. Apart from the graphics and the technical implementation, user interaction had to be observed to make usage more easy and intuitive. Now, even competing methods of input (click/scroll/using arrow keys) can be handled by the gallery software.

Our creative and often experimental approaches made development interesting. A close contact and frequent communication has been vital for the successful implementation. We always found a consensus for features and changes.

By now, the page is not online any more, and I will not develop it any further, as development for the underlying platform (Adobe Flash) has been discontinued on mobile Browsers. More and more people browse the Web on mobile devices these days, so it’s important to be able to serve these visitors as well. However, when development started, the discontinuation was not foreseeable. We chose Adobe Flash Technology because the layout stays consistent and controllable through various screen sizes and devices. Moreover, alternative technologies (HTML/CSS3) were just at the beginning.

Links:

a working version of the site with demo data