Megan Bednarz

Well, after struggling with some strange transparency issues, I finally managed to get this right. I followed the tutorial Adan used for his screwdriver to make the lighting work here. It’s supposed to be sitting on a sheet of textured paper.  The background is a blurred image supposed to represent a room. I did depth of field to make it sit back in the frame a bit better. I wasn’t able to do any caustic effects because of the timeframe, but I think it looks pretty real as it is!

Nurbs can’t stop me!! I eventually just grouped a bunch of objects for that tip part. Now… I have to figure out materials and lighting. Argh! But at least I can be assured my pen is mathematically accurate to a tolerance of .02 cm…at least for most of it! I had to eyeball some of it. But finally… it’s done!

It’s shaping up. I was having trouble earlier trying to get the surfaces I had for the clip part to actually trim… I realized it was because I didn’t have the trim edge going all the way around. Bah.

I created the base of this with the Loft tool going through some circles… so I could use the circles again for the interior of the cap. This cap is made of 6 objects that I plan to group, since I need to keep the hard edges.

I was going to work on this Friday, but regrettably I got sick. Thankfully I am feeling better today, but I definitely need my rest if I am to recover. And so the pen remains… unfinished

Apparently I will never work at Dreamworks because I hate NURBS. They may be mathematically accurate, but they’re a pain in the behind!

However, I have decided to use NURBS for this project because they are accurate and because they seem to be the optimal solution for modeling the pen.

The bic pen! Cheap, but trusty. Found this image from this very interesting blog post. I hope to focus mainly on the lighting. Since it is a transparent object, it should be very cool-looking if I get it right!