Lightsabers

I had some extra time, so I made Anikin Skywalker's Lightsaber.

YJFC Pictures

Some pictures of the epee to be used in an upcoming banner for the Yellow Jacket Fencing Club.

Sorry about the misalignment and the weird shading. I can provide the .ipn files if necessary.

Possible format for the poster?

Ray Gun

Here is a quick solid-state retro futuristic ray-gun I made in half an hour. I want to see where I can go with this and hopefully expand it out into some more professional-looking designs and perhaps a series of different ray-guns or retro-future.

Like I said, a very basic and un-finished design. I have to say I was very pleased with the way the handle turned out.

One more blueprint

After looking at the last blueprint I posted, I felt like most of the detail was left out due to the scale of the drawing. I made a new one with detailed views and it looks a great deal better.

Apparently there is some artifacts leftover from the rendering process on the isometric view but the detailed views still look good and that was my main goal.

Stargate Blueprint

I thought that this would be a cool thing to have up. A "blueprint" of the Stargate! 

Gotta catch em' all!

I just started playing Pokemon Soulsilver, a remake of my favorite game in the series, and got a bit hooked. Like any rational pokemon obsessed person, I made stuff in Inventor that glorified pokemon. 

I have only made a pokeball so far but I intend to make a full heal and a few potions. Possibly even a pokecenter. 

 The closed pokeball

The closed pokeball again but with features outlined this time

The inside of the pokeball, I could not get the hinge right so I just split it in two. I hope this answers a lot of questions for some people 

Both open and closed pokeballs sitting on a table. Stupid pillar... 

I thought a wireframe would look pretty neat. 

Thanks for looking! I hope you enjoyed it! If you have a favorite kind of pokeball, let me know and if enough people choose it, I'll make it! 

Finished!!

The Stargate is finally completed! This thing was a heck of a job. There were so many minuscule details over the surface of the ring and they caused Inventor to crash a couple of times due to memory issues. I am very pleased with the whole thing. Every part that needs to move, can move ie. the chevrons and the constellation ring.  I rendered a lot of JPGS of it so I hope you enjoy looking at it as I did making it.

An isometric view with very little detail exposed.

A bit more detail....

Front view 

The best view I could make showing the most amount of detail while still showing the full ring

Zoomed in a bit more. I did not realize that you still cant see the smaller details fully. 

Chevron one is encoded. Also probably the best picture showing off the smaller details of the ring.

Inventor has some pretty nifty 3D dioramas that you can render in. I feel like this back drop suits the Stargate the best. 

The Stargate on a beautiful day in the countryside. 

Stargate in the middle of a courtyard. Looks kinda arty. 

And Finally......

Rolling down a road lol

I really hope you enjoyed looking at my work. This took me a total of 8 hours to design and I am quite proud. Let me know if you want to see any more views of the Stargate or any more of its detail and I would be happy to post them. 

Up next... Sabers and Foils? Or maybe something sci-fi again? 

Step one complete!

The Stargate is almost finished! Just need the outer ring and the Chevrons!

Without constellations.

With constellations

Random projects

I have been keeping my self busy this summer with things other than Inventor, and now I have time to post what else I have been up to.

I have been reading the sci-fi space opera The Mote in God's Eye for the past week and a half. I have to say for a book from the 70's, it shares very similar ideas as to what we presently believe to be coming in the future. It is also possible that a great deal of other books that have come out recently use some of the same ideas that The Mote in God's Eye uses. There are special jumping points within systems that allow people to travel instantaneously using a special jump drive (other sci-fi that uses this is EVE online, Stargate, and the Halo Universe). The book also uses the classic force-field, laser cannons etc.. However, their communications and computing technology come straight out of the 70's. Ships utilize telescopes to find objects outside of their normal range of vision, a lot different and more realistic than the classic "Enlarge it and put it on the viewscreen." The humans in the novel also have a more realistic approach to communicating than most other sci-fi by using a pulsed laser to send information between planets and ships, however this communication is limited by line of sight and time lag at great distances, a problem that most works of science fiction choose to ignore. The one thing that I found the most shocking in terms of their computing technology was that they still used magnetic tape to store information. The book takes place 1000 years into the future and apparently the best way to keep track of data is to haul it around in gigantic magnetic reels. At least the aliens in the book are not humans with some modification to their foreheads. I have to say The Mote in God's Eye has been an interesting read so far, albeit a little slow-going, the climax took me roughly 350 pages to get to with 200 pages remaining, and I would highly recommend it for anyone who is a fan of the classic first contact with an alien race storyline.

I have also been working on trying to improve my soldering and circuitry skills. So far I have had one failure and one success.  I'll show the failure first to keep the success fresh in your mind.

This is a very simple circuit I tried to make using a playing card as a board. I think I may have put the anode in the wrong orientation and that is whats holding this from working, but I tested it with a voltmeter and found that the button I used does not transmit any current through it while its depressed. Either way, the whole thing was very "prof-of-concept" to see if I could solder directly onto a playing card, and as it turns out, you can. 

So on to my success with soldering. This is the first real circuit I have ever put together using a soldering iron. The circuit takes sound in as an input and modulates a signal/voltage to the LED cluster to make them glow depending on the volume of the voice. I made it from a Dual White LED Stroboscope # MK147 (kit requires soldering assembly) (not this one but a similar one, could not find the link for it) that I bought at Fry's.  I made a few mistakes here and there while making it like my first two components I soldered on it are not level with the card, but I feel like it was a great learning experience and I highly recommend it for anyone who has never soldered before. 

  

 The beginning of  the Enterprise NX-01  that Sandy got me for Christmas. A nifty little model that I put together in about half an hour. Unfortunately I did not realize that you need to apply the decals before assembly because you have to soak the whole thing in water so that they will stick. It still turned out great though!

The completed model.

And finally, my display of another skill I decided to try this summer, knitting.

Not a whole lot to say about this besides that I have great difficulty doing it. The one on the left started with 20 stitches and somehow grew to 40 something along the way. The one on the right ended up a lot nicer but I messed up near the end and was unable to finish it correctly. 

And for Joey... A furry visconti grip. 

I don't know why he requested it, but I did it..... 

Final Epee Parts

Due to popular demand, I created a visconti pistol grip. I originally tried doing this by extruding a bunch of times from the origin but found it to be much easier to make a block and cut away at it. 

I also made some presentation files of the socket and point assemblies with exploded views. I think they look really cool they way they turned out,