Archive for February, 2010
Locomotive lifted from Carrbridge derailment site
Sun Feb 14th - 3:50pm
The derailed 167-tonne locomotive at Carrbridge train station was lifted last night, by a team from Port Services using a specialist crane that can lift up to 1,000 tonnes. I had reliable information that the lift would be happening that night, but still you never know exactly how fast these heavy-lift operations will go so I turned up at midnight, found the best angle, and waited with my flask of soup 
It was around 3am when the lift began:
After the loco was raised by about 20-feet there was a lot of banging noises from near the crane so the loco was lowered again while adjustments were made. Then the lift began for real. The next photo was used by the BBC as their "Big Picture" for today. Nice to see a wide shot being used, as it tends to be mostly tight shots that are used nowadays. I think a wide shot can often tell the story better.
And the next photo was used on the STV News web site.
The photos have all been sent to the national newspapers too so hopefully some will be used tomorrow. I'm fairly sure this next one won't be used, but I like it because of the composition with the guys sitting on the vehicle at the right of the frame.
Close-up of the loco being loaded on to a transporter which will take it by road to wherever it's going:
As preparation for the night shoot I had gone along to the site on Saturday afternoon. There was nobody around so I took the opportunity to go down to where the loco had come to rest. Naturally I called my better half to let her know what I was doing, so if she didn't hear from me in 10 minutes then something was wrong. You should always do that if you're going alone in to any situation where there's an element of risk. (Or just don't put yourself in that situation.)
I also made a panorama of the whole site. It was a 60-megapixel composite of 35 photos, showing a full 180-degrees, although it looked a little silly having the road at both sides of the picture so I cropped it to this middle section.
Click here to see a larger version
This is how the full 180-degree view looked:
And for novelty value, here's a 53-megapixel panorama made from 24 photos showing the scene where the locomotive has been stranded for nearly six weeks.
Click here to see a larger version
The curious case of Tesco and non-alcoholic drinks
Thu Feb 4th - 9:49pm
There have been two quirky stories about Tesco in the news recently, one about them banning shoppers from wearing pyjamas and another about a 24-year-old woman being asked for ID because she wanted to buy a slice of quiche.
We had our own run-in with a strange Tesco policy the other night. My girlfriend Katie wanted to buy some non-alcoholic cider, but the self-service checkout refused the sale because it was apparently classed as an alcoholic drink which can't be sold after 10pm:
Now you might think this is a simple computer error. After all the product does clearly state ALCOHOL-FREE right there in big writing on the front label.
But no! The manager of the store got involved and told us that the product is correctly classed as an alcoholic drink because, according to the (very) small print on the back of the label, it can contain up to 0.05% alcohol. If he authorised the sale, he said, he would lose his job and be hit with a £5,000 fine.
What's really bizarre, though, is that I was able to go and pick up a can of Shandy Bass, which contains TEN TIMES as much alcohol (0.5%) and the self-service checkout was quite happy for me to pay my 49p and leave with the product:
3D visualisation: Perfume bottle on satin sheet
Wed Feb 3rd - 7:42pm
My second project for learning 3DS Max was to design a fairly simple object with non-standard, non-symmetrical geometry, and build it exactly how I envisaged it, ie: working out how to create a specific structure in 3D, not just pulling a shape in random directions until I eventually found something that was nearly right. I'm going to want to do this commercially one day, and sooner rather than later, so I need to be able to work to a designer's exact specifications.
I decided to create a perfume bottle, as this would involve a few other challenges to keep things interesting, such as making a semi-opaque glass material, and putting a logo on the bottle. And I made it a bit harder for myself by displaying the perfume bottle on a satin sheet, draped over a block, which involved learning about 'cloth' materials in Max. So quite a tricky project for a beginner, but I'd say the result is fairly good. Click to enlarge:
Here's how the scene looked in Max:
Note that the logo isn't simply 'typed' in to the scene. It had to be created separately as a texture and added to a plane, which was then meticulously manipulated to fit the shape of the bottle. There may be an easier way to achieve the same effect, but here's what I did:
The litte ridges at the bottom of the bottle were produced using a displacement map. But if I had applied that map to the whole of the glass material then it would have created weird ridges all over the top and bottom of the bottle, so I only added it to a 'ring' of faces around the bottom of the bottle. That introduced a new challenge: Manually editing the texture co-ordinates (UVs) for those faces. That was a lot easier than I expected.
Designing the satin sheet was fun as Max includes material simulation, so I only needed to create the flat sheet and then tell Max to drape it over the box. I'm not 100% happy with the satin material I created as it looks a little too much like plastic to me, but the intricacies of material design aren't the priority at this stage.
First steps in 3D visualisation
Mon Feb 1st - 4:25am
I've always been interested in 3D visualisation, and I've dabbled with several design packages over the years, but it's only recently that I've committed some serious time to learning the skills needed in this fascinating area of creativity.
Over the last few weeks I've started to get competent with basic geometry creation and manipulation in 3DS Max, and I'm even scratching the surface of material creation which turns out to be a lot harder than I expected.
I'd say it's about time that I unleashed my first render for the world to see. This is the result of a self-assigned challenge to produce a vaguely realistic diamond and light it appropriately. I took it a step further and rendered a scene with several diamonds, some basic coloured objects, all on a reflective surface with bump and displacement maps. The render was produced in mental ray.
Click to view a larger version:
Here's how the raw scene looked in 3DS:
The goal of this project was primarily to learn about creating the different materials and then light the scene using traditional photographic lighting. The scene has three key lights, all behind the objects, including two hard spotlights at either side. This was because glassy materials look better with light coming through them, rather than bouncing off them. There's one fill light in front of the objects.
Here's exactly the same scene, but with more dramatic lighting, simply by bringing the main backlight down to just above the objects. (And no lens flare! Yay!)
Same scene with the original lighting, but with the coloured shapes replaced by wooden blocks and a less-than-perfect chrome ball:
Next I want to produce something with more complicated geometry.
