Alias Design has published my latest in my Devil in the Details series. In this episode, I show a methodology for creating geometry that looks geometric but ‘feels’ organic. My intent with this piece was not so much teach a set of tools, but a way to ‘see’; being able to identify problem surfaces and know how to achieve a better result.

Last summer, my awesome wife gave me the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Star Wars Millennium Falcon. She’s so awesome!

It was a super fun build and without sounding like a “what I did last summer” essay, it took me a little over 45 hours to put together.

Of course, that included time to organize the parts – which covered our dinning room table with both leaves inserted…

And time for a few ceremonial in-progress photos (although not nearly enough)…

And the final piece!!!

Did I mention how awesome my wife is? She’s pretty awesome – and then she got awesomer!

For Christmas, Santa (a.k.a my awesome wife) brought me the Lego Star Destroyer. This was another super fun build – although it only took me about 19 hours to complete. The parts were pretty well pre-sorted in the box and there are many fewer little details to slow you down than on the Falcon – not to mention the whole Falcon is asymmetric; meaning you can’t build large sections in duplicate like on the Destroyer.

Wading waist deep through Lego Star Wars replica’s got me wondering – If I have this monster Lego Falcon  kit, but wanted a relative scale Star Destroyer to hide it on, how big would that have to be. It turns out, bigger than I could ever build – 178 ft in length!

But what about the other way around? I have a monster Star Destroyer. Could I make a tiny little Falcon to go on it?

Well it’s pretty small. It’s not even an inch in length. So I whipped-up a quick CAD model in Alias and sent it off to our 3D printer at work. The thing is so small it only took 6 minutes to build on the FDM.

Designing it was fun too. I wanted it to be a functional Lego piece and the only way to do so was to make it only one stud big. It has a hole on the underside, just a like a real Lego piece would and a single Lego stud on it’s dome – just in case I ever want to attach any additional Lego to it.

Spending a few hours researching the proper size of the Falcon and building the CAD for the Lego part, I inevitably stumbled upon Tim Ketzer’s site. I was enchanted. I also have a new hobby…

Has it been a month (or more) already? So it has, and Alias Design has posted another tutorial. This time I take a look at a quick method for dealing with semi-complex mechanics in appearance models.

This is the first in a three part series called the “Devil in the Details”. I’ll go through a variety of seemingly small issues that I come across as a designer that make all the difference in a successful presentation of a concept. Enjoy.

Hey all! Alias Design has just published my most recent tutorial. It looks at some approaches to developing parting lines around difficult edges. The workflow is robust and takes full advantage of the construction history features and makes iterating quick and painless. Check it out here.

So I didn’t blog as much as I had hoped. AU had us pretty busy – real busy. Most of the sessions started at 8:15 AM and ran for about two hours until 7 at night – at which point there was a quick dinner and then off to something else – either a presentation or software user testing and the Design Slam. I was getting back to the hotel by 10 and just passed out from the day. Whew!

 Core 77 has some good coverage of the event here.

Among some of my favorite session were of course the Jay Shuster Pixar talk on Friday, and the Daniel Simon and Scott Robertson talks. All brilliant work.

Gray Holland’s class was great as well. I have an odd relationship with Gray – I’d never met him until this week, but have had the privilege of picking apart many of his files while consulting for Nike. My Natural Surfacing demos (1, 2, and 3) on the AliasDesign website are somewhat of an homage to him. Thanks Gray!

And then my mind got totally melted in the couple of Class A Automotive surfacing classes that I took. Those guys are maniacs. So much to learn and so little time…

Lastly, Stratasys had, as part of the opening keynote, a full sized FDM motorcycle. Yup – a rapid prototype print of a vehicle. It wasn’t built all in one piece, but all the major components were. The wheels were a single part each, the gas tank was a single part, etc… Those are some big pieces to print.