archibaseplanet.com models

[myxpykalix]

Keep in mind that i started making 3d models in the early 90's with an Amiga computer using a Video Toaster and Lightwave. Now in making 3d objects for animations and 3d scenes there was a whole lot more "attributes" that went into creating a model that you had to account for, for example surface attributes, that we don't need to be concerned with in making models now.

It's a long winded way of asking why the models on many of these sites are of such low polygon count and quality that they are almost useless for our purposes. Occasionally i have found a decent quality model there but for the most part, not many. Has anyone found something they have carved that turned out good?

I suppose that if you use, say, a rosette on a door frame within a 3d model of a room you don't see the low quality but try to cut that rosette out and it's all blocky and useless.
I (think) i recall a program i use to have that would take a model and analyze your model and add polygons to make it smoother, but that was way back in the 90's and i can't remember the name of it:confused:

Just wondered if anyone had any good luck with those or knew the pgm i might be talking about?

[Brady Watson]

The models are low poly count because they are used in animation and video games. They project a mapped texture onto the low poly model to give a more realistic looking character. They are low poly because it would take a lot of video card to process all those polys any time there was a small movement.

-B

[myxpykalix]

Yes, thanks, if they made an object suitable for our purposes that 10 meg model would be 100 megs.:eek: Whats funny is that I could make a full polygon count model and animate in using my 25 meg memory Amiga easier and better then the pcs of today. It was amazing, however the rendering per frame was way slower back then:eek:

[Burkhardt]

...Has anyone found something they have carved that turned out good?....?

Well, kind of. But I am not sure what kind of models you are looking for.

For me it was just for a few experiments but I found reasonable (and free) models on:

http://archive3d.net/ like the girl in the image below (4" tall) or the salad hands. The figurine was made using 4-side indexed machining on a rotation axis, the hands with manual 2-sided flipping. Since the hand model was a real hand I had to graft the handle on in CAD.

or

http://3dbar.net/?p=24986 I only tried importing the some models in 3d-cut but did not actually cut them. But it looks like pretty good resolution.

I purchased an antique chess set model from www.turbosquid.com (http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/max-chess-games-figure/568130), not cheap at $279 and one day I will cut the set.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-m4SqqlC1fZo/T5xfyzwyRuI/AAAAAAAADG0/xHNDSUAQAMM/w507-h862-no/DSC00799.JPG

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wTN9MBnWrcQ/T26qDhFu6OI/AAAAAAAAEQo/fH2Dzoekyhs/w1024-h506-no/DSC00499.JPG

[myxpykalix]

AWWWW.....i'm tellin...you posted a picture of a "nekked girl"! :eek: lol

I like the idea of the "salad hands" but man those fingers are creepy:eek:

I wasn't looking for anything in particular, maybe just voicing my disappointment with what i was seeing on that site. I'm more into looking for architectural models and elements then anything but don't have a particular project at the moment to use it on, unless you count the chicken coop i'm currently making:D

[genek]

Nice hands and figure.. Looks great. Thanks for sharing.

[Burkhardt]

...... I'm more into looking for architectural models and elements.........

Have a look at the 3d-bar link that I posted above. There are some nice architectural and decorative models in the "Arc Column" and "Decor" sections that may be suitable to wall decorations, wainscoting and the like. In the "furniture section there is that chair with the face on the back. Pretty cool idea and I am tempted to make that sometimes.

What bothers me a bit about this site is they say the models are free and they can indeed be readily downloaded but I am missing the information where they come from. Somebody must have the copyright to that and I am wondering if they are really free or just lifted somewhere.

[myxpykalix]

I looked at the one model you linked and it is the same quality as the archibase models, nothing i would bother to try to cut.:(

[Burkhardt]

You are a really picky guy ;)

I agree the model quality varies but some look much better in the flesh (that means in the wood) than on the screen. I made a test with one of the column models of the 3d-bar.com site and cut it out of 1.5x1.5" piece of cumaru (1/4" rough, 1/16' ball finish). It is pretty small and some details are suffering from the radius of the already small finish bit. A larger piece would look surely much better. Anyway, for my purposes the model resolution is good enough. Now I need to find out what to do with a 4" tall Corinthian column.....

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4UnvuDednc8/UjAIeugHuHI/AAAAAAAAEQ4/WAhRH-9Gsfo/w420-h800-no/DSC01919.JPG

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-TwROa7gu208/UjAIfEE4bWI/AAAAAAAAERA/_N-NJErOcUA/w543-h800-no/DSC01920.JPG

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-t9C05g55jKI/UjAIdu1s-1I/AAAAAAAAEQw/V_VK9MgW33c/w800-h600-no/DSC01912.JPG

[myxpykalix]

Hi G,
On some things i guess you have to be a little picky, because i guess our idea of what a column is seems to differ:eek: lol (by about 8 feet)

The columns i make are usually about 7 to 8 feet tall and about 10-12" diameter. So any imperfections would be greatly magnified.

As far as what to do with a 4" tall column....make 3 more and that would be a good start for a 4 poster bed for this guy:rolleyes:

[chunkstyle]

Wow Jack,

An Amiga? Hadn't thought about them since I got rid of my 3000 tower back in the early 2000's. They were a great little box of chips. Used to be able to do real time pencil testing in 64 bit grey scale that would make the latest, at that time, Mac or PC **** out. They were a great example of using smart chips instead of a bigger hammer of a CPU. Was sad to see the company fall by the wayside.

Trying to understand the 3d modeling world a bit better. Are all 3d models basically the same idea of being composed of small flat planes? Is it all about the polygon facet count and size and are there better formats than other?

Sorry if this is straying from your focus of a source for good 3d models Jack but it seemed like an opportunity to open up the conversation to a broader discussion of these model formats and how they work. Hope I don't offend. I've read past posts where there was a preference of formats but wondered why.

Tim

[mikeacg]

How old are you Jack? Ha ha ha!

I started on a Radio Shack MC10 (4K memory and used a TV and cassette recorder to save programs in Basic) and then stepped up to a 16K Timex Sinclair! We sure had fun back then, didn't we?

Mike

[myxpykalix]

Michael,
My first computer was a TRS 80, my first computer for my video stores in the 70's was this other Radio Shack with 16K memory and my first real video editing, 3d model making animation computer was this Amiga2000 (actually i think i had a Amiga1000 before this but don't know where it is).

I recall having to talk to the people who wrote the program for the video rental software over the phone and having to manually input one character at a time to write the code when it would need revising or fixing a problem. We used those 5.5" floppy disks fr backup remember those?

btw i'll be 60 on the 21st of this month.:eek:

I don't know why i'm holding on to these things. I guess they are antiques, wonder if they are worth anything?:rolleyes:

[zeykr]

I always wanted an Amiga! Started on an 8k Commodore PET, then moved up to the Commodore 64's. Leaned to program in assembler on an IBM using punch cards, then moved up to a DEC PDP 11/70 using DEC writer terminals. We've come a long ways.

I still have the Commodore PET, several Commodore 64's in various forms (portable, school model etc), and an Apple II. Would love to add an Altair and an Amiga to the collection someday.

[khalid]

Jack,
Sell them and enjoy the rest of your life without doing any work:D ...

[dana_swift]

My first computer has a whopping 256 BYTES of ram! And another 256 BYTES of EEPROM! It was a smoker.. ran at a whopping 1mhz (if I remember correctly). Used a genuine Intel 8080. Thats a 8080, not an 8080A. It had three power supplies and required a special clock phasing circuit.

Input was 8 toggle switches, output was 8 leds. The Apple 1 would still be in the future. It was all hand wire-wrapped, but it worked. It could do some high level programs, such as multiply two numbers! Such capabilities...

----

Tim- your comment about all 3D models being a series of facets is not "quite" so. That is what most 3D programs do, but not all. True cones, cylinders, and spheres and other such non-planer primitives are supported in some modelers. However STL files cannot represent anything other than a faceted surface. Since STL files are the most common interchange files for 3D shapes, it is an easy shortcut to drop support for other geometries.

My recollection is POV ray is a true 3D modeler, supporting other geometries, I have not used it in quite a while so my memory may be lapsing. (Probably back to 256 bytes of working memory in the gray mush) Check out:
http://www.povray.org/


3D modeling is a really fascinating thing to look into. It gets deep mathematically quickly when you get under the hood. But mere mortals came up with it, and mere mortals can figure it all out with persistence.

Just thought I would chime in :)

[steve_g]

I've still got most of my first computer... 10 digits. Now days It can only count to 9.75 though. Ouch.

SG

[bleeth]

Once my family moved to Florida and I didn't wear shoes a lot I discovered my computer could go to 20.

[jerry_stanek]

the reason women a smarter is theirs go to 22

[myxpykalix]

Jerry i didn't realize that they had 6 toes on each foot?:confused::rolleyes:

[genek]

Jack you missed it... they have ten toes and ten fingers and two other digits. Do we need to draw you a picture. two circles and two dots. lol

[ssflyer]

This thread is too funny! I built my first computer in the mid 70's. Trying to remember when I upgraded to the Z80 processor! :eek: After that I went to an Altos UNIX system, that I got for a great price, after recommending a motherboard fix that they implemented.

Next was a Commodore VIC 20. I built an add-in video processing card, relay interface and expansion RAM module that brought it up to a whopping 16K of memory! (if I remember right, it came with 3.86K) :)

I bought the expansion module cases for my boards from a game manufacturer in Santa Clara, who kindly threw in free copies of every game they made for the Commodore - ****, there went a couple of weeks of work! :D

What I used it for was a controller for the big 800 lb. satellite dishes. You could program up the 3 satellite changes per night, to record stuff on different satellites - with graphics of a house with the TV flickering through the window, as it changed. (Back in the day, you actually had to move that big dish to different satellites!) The preferred method, before I designed this was to send your wife/husband out to the dish, loosen a set screw, then yell at them, until they pushed it to the correct position!

Damn, I'm old! :eek:

I think Dana has me beat, though! BTW, Dana, I loved the quote, "But mere mortals came up with it, and mere mortals can figure it all out with persistence," since the POV in POV-Ray stands for, Persistence of Vision,"

[myxpykalix]

Ron,
You think you are old...?? I used to have a satellite systems dealership back in the day and we sold and installed 12' and 16' satellite dishes. We would align the dish to a specific arc then we had hand cranks with degree settings so you could narrow in to your satellite settings. At that time there were only 24 channels per satellite.
Then it got fancy with the actuator arms that moves it to specific settings. The mac daddy of systems back then was the 8' BirdView:eek:
I still have some of the receivers and actuator arm and controllers in boxes somewhere here. Just don't ask me to show you my betamax and first vhs or my 12" laserdisc player or collection of laserdiscs.:eek:

[ssflyer]

Jack, LOL - I manufactured 800 lb. fiberglass dishes licensed from Earl "Madman" Muntz. Same guy that had his car commercials with his hand in his shirt, like Napoleon, invented 4-track tapes and the Muntz Jet! :eek:

As far as I know, I developed the first drive system for them, called the "Dish Drive." It was a rack and pinion system powered by a Granger geared AC motor. First iteration used a micro switch and adhesive pads for location. It obviously went a long way from there! It was way better than the attempted knock-offs, using trailer jacks!

BTW, I also used to have a massive 12" aluminum platter for one of the really early hard drives!

Isn't reminiscing fun? :D

[scottp55]

OMG, All I can say is I'm lucky that back then if it didn't fit in my backpack (0r in "76 my Beemer bags) I didn't need it, otherwise I'd need an addition to my house. Did have the first tent in Maine with Phone,electrical,Sat dish, and running water(only cold though) as far as I know. Designed the house in the tent using ArchCad? while lying on a wood canvas cot, " why can't you build from 9.5x11.5" canon copier blueprints?". Still have the sat hardware sitting in the tree? I've joined a bunch of packrats! I'm glad I built 3,200 sq.ft. house, Barely had to move much stuff at all to fit the Desktop in. :)

[myxpykalix]

Ron,
Just for you...i'm going to see if i can find that actuator motor for the satellite...i can see it in my head but its probably under something somewhere but i have seen it in the last 6 months because i was thinking about using it to move a solar hot water collector i have. I just saw the box for a gilespie satellite reciever and the tracker motor now i have to pull them down and open them up.

[jerry_stanek]

I had a Gillespie sat receiver for my first one along with a Odan dish made my own remote actuator using a reversible drill and some pulleys. The first one had a back fire feed then got a tripod horn. California Amp LNA. The first LNA worked ok until it got below 28 degrees then would quit working Talked to California amp and they wanted it back as they only checked it for heat not cold, Their thinking was west coast and heat. I got a free upgade to a much better amp from them