Book cover pages, flyers and educational technical art

 

In this blog entry I present some recent cover pages that I have drawn in Affinity Designer, Rhinoceros and Cinema 4D. These were all created in A4 format for educational books in the advanced composite business for a company in which the entrepreneurs each have over 3 decades experience in high-tech companies in the severely regulated aviation and aerospace market. Also I placed some of examples of technical art created in 2D and 3D. The books were created in InDesign up to some 5 years ago, after which I switched to Affinity Publisher. In all of them I drew all images from scratch. These are books, contain a 100 to 300 pages, deal with the complex matter and processes in the advanced composites world.

Composite repair book cover 1 - Affinity Designer

Composite repair book cover 2 - Affinity Designer

Composite fabrication book cover 3 - Affinity Designer 

Some older books that I created from cover to back

One off design concept for Lufthansa - Affinity Designer

SAE report - Affinity Designer

Vacuum bagging method - Rhinoceros 3D

Composite repair student exercise tools - Rhinoceros 3D

Vacuum bag schedule - Rhinoceros 3D

Plain weave schematic - Cinema 4D

Hotbonder - Cinema 4D

Boeing composite locations with numbers for the colour blind - Affinity Designer

Boeing B777 presentation drawing - Cinema 4D

Airbus A350 presentation drawing - Rhinoceros 3D

Vacuum bag connector - Rhinoceros 3D

Honeycomb panel repair layers Rinoveros 3D

Tubular back-up structure - Rhinoceros 3D

Vacuum valves on differently curved surfaces - Rhinoceros 3D

Blender 3D re-invented itself

The 3D design world has almost completely been monopolised by Autodesk and their subscription fees have since soared beyond the spending capacity of by far most people. One could comfortably buy, drive and maintain a properly ensured car for that kind of money. And whereas the opportunity to travel is a basic need of life, leasing a 3D package for an extremely steep rental fee, certainly is not.

Donating a voluntary modest monthly amount of money would greatly help to continue the development of Blender that has finally made its UI more accessible to a larger number of users. Expanding its contributing user base would allow it to remain competitive.

A truly open source model without donations would make it difficult to survive for complex and regularly updated programs in a market aggressively attacked by corporations such as Autodesk. The Blender organisation offers a way for many users to benefit from far more reasonable terms than the corporate products, while by no means sacrificing functionality.

In addition, the recent alliance with Ubisoft has the potential to counter Autodesk's monopoly, especially since Blender in fact offers more than the average 3D program in terms of versatile capability. Blender offers advanced modeling, rendering, sculpting, 2D vector drawing and animation / screen capturing in one package! In more than one way, this is a magnificent development!

I would therefore urge 3D artists that formerly found it difficult to wrap their mind around Blender's UI, to check out the 2.8 beta release candidate that features many significant changes that make it a lot more user friendly - nowhere near the puzzling shortcut key driven workflow of previous versions. It truly blends all above listed options into one coherent and relatively easy to learn application.

I get it that hardcore Blender users find the changes annoying, but I think there are at least equally as many artists that could never get on good terms with the old UI. For the latter group and new users the renovation of the interface will probably feel as a blessing. In view of Ubisoft's involvement the aim most likely is to grow, which means that some of the functions that were hidden within Blender's former niche interface, needed to be altered to suit a more common understanding of how to operate the program. Which in my view the developers did in a wonderful way.

If Blender would have continued its niche approach of its interface, that may have hampered their aim to expand its user base and make its program more attractive for developers in the gaming industry (and in doing so for a great number of other users as well!), which would be a pity since the program has so many awesome functions, that put it on par with its hugely over priced commercial competition. This undoubtedly is why Ubisoft sought collaboration, that must have seen this is potentially a match made in heaven . . . .

Quetzalcoatl snake-guitar

I was born in the year of the Snake in the Water lunar cycle according to the Chinese zodiac. Because of this at some point I wanted to create a guitar that had the shape of a snake. It probably was of some sort of surrogate compensation of me being unable to get some decent sounds out of such an instrument, in spite of many attempts. I never got beyond the plucking of The House of the Rising Sun accords and even then the neighbours called the police to have me arrested. As hardware and software progressed, I used various 3D programs, none of which allowed me to produce the image I had in my head, until Rhinoceros R5 and T-Splines made it possible to approximate my vision.

3D organic shapes

3D programs have evolved over the years at a tremendous pace. Today it is possible in many of them to create realistic organic shapes, somewhat similar to molding clay, which - as opposed to stone carving - allows to remove as well as add material to objects that are being built. In addition to the real life molding process, the software takes care of calculating smooth transitions between adjacent areas while automatically creating a symmetrical half of the object if so desired by the artist. Creating symmetrical shapes is therefore no longer a tedious task that consumes shiploads of the artist's time.

3D design created in Rhinoceros R5 + I-Splines

3D printing

3D printing has a great future. The devices are still unaffordable for the average consumer, but as the technique develops it will become within reach of the private people. Larger, complex objects will be printed by specialized companies, but simple constructions will one time soon be printed at home not too far away in the future. As is the case with all consumer goods, the possibility to produce complex objects with 3D printing devices will be increasing rapidly. This will include plastic parts, composite materials, metals (including non-ferro objects). Basically any material needed to produce useful things.

Simple 3D printed ring

Working under pressure

Working under pressure. Negative pressure as you might notice. It requires more than one 3D applications between which objects can be traded using either .dxf or .3ds files. It makes working for the user easier but the computer has to work harder several 3D apps open.

Pressure gauge

High end 3D app filleting

Low end and mid range 3D application commonly struggle with producing proper filleting of curves. Some even mess up in performing such tasks. Even more so when fillets of different radii meet and / or surfaces join at angles other than perpendicular. High end 3D programs however have no trouble handling such matters. See image below where detail is in red circles.

3D fillets

3D applications have different approaches to processing matters; the way in which their functions handle things are distinguished. The algorithms in which they calculate certain processes are different formulas. In this respect they resemble people all of whom have different talents and different things at which they suck (pardon my French). The image below is an example of the different way of handling of matters.

The fillet of the object at the top is irregular while the bottom one is smooth. It is an angled joint of two pipes of a different diameter - one of the constructions that a number of 3D programs do not handle well. The fillet actually looks like a real life weld of welder who was not too skilled. Also the fillet command disrupted the surface of the slanted pipe. The application producing the poor filleting does an excellent job at other types of modeling, rendering and creating animations, but this particular function gives bad results. It is probably why many 3D artists use various applications to achieve whatever they want to achieve.

High end applications

I have been watching a number of tutorials on Youtube on a high end 3D program - Solid Edge - and became stunned by its complexity that was paired with a user friendliness that I was unaware of. This seems to be a contradiction, but in fact it just requires the user to adapt a different frame of mind when modeling parts. What this means, is that many relations between (sub) parts exists - similar to what we encounter in every day life - that we take for grated without actually being aware of it. The complex functionality was made to serve user comfort and increase construction options dramatically, which are features never seen in the over the counter commercial apps most people have installed on their computer.