Reverse Engineered Object - Final

After working on this for a few weeks I feel like I have to come clean: I stole this pen from my principal in high school. He was a homophobe though so I consider this a win! 

You aren't getting your pen back Tom.

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For this project, we were tasked with choosing an object that we could reasonably reverse engineer within the given time limit. Along with multiple process posts, the final deliverable was to make full renders of the object, both put together and exploded to show all the parts as well as how they interact. Historically I have a tendency to overachieve and screw myself over with these projects, so I wanted to pick something that was enough of a challenge without being too unreasonable.

While the pen was overall not too difficult, it was definitely tedious; there were a lot of intricate parts and I found myself sitting there just staring at it multiple times because I was overwhelmed. I think if I could go back and start this again, I would find a better way to approach it, maybe setting a specific goal each week so I only had a couple things to be worried about instead of the entire thing. Despite this it still ended up being a lot of fun to work on! I especially enjoyed messing around with the materials and renders, even when my laptop started to overheat so much I could've fried an egg on it. While I had a couple issues overall I still think I was successful in creating my object. 

Let's have a look at the renders!

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I was especially proud of how the text + logo turned out; I did this by finding the logo online, editing it in FireAlpaca to match the pen, and adding it to the pen material as a decal!

And the exploded ones:

I still don't know why this one rendered orange? I turned off the ground plane, messed around with the lighting/shadows, and re-rendered and it still looked like this. So I guess we get cool mood lighting for this shot!

I also might make an extra process post to show how I made the last few pieces of the pen, since it doesn't really fit in with the final blog post! But for the moment I have to move on to other homework. Everyone's projects look awesome so far, I can't wait to check out the rest tomorrow :)

Thanks for reading!

- Forrest