Yay! The final part of my Details series is up on the Alias Design website.  Of particular note was that this part in the series was done in the Mac OS X version of Alias! I am pleased as punch to be working natively in Alias on my Mac and have few reasons to keep my Boot Camp partition around now. I look forward to all the projects that lay ahead for this software and it really is a game changer for my process. I plan on having a more in-depth ‘review’ soon!

Look for more tutorials from me in the future, but in the meantime enjoy!

J.

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.