I enjoyed painting several whisky glasses some years ago, and therefore decided to model a whisky glass for the practice, with facets and all. This naturally lead to creating ice cubes etc. to make up a complete scene, with the intention of achieving a certain level of realism. Modeling and texturing was done in Blender 2.63 using my own image textures, and rendered with Cycles GPU rendering.

Whisky glass, oil on canvas, 31½ x 27½ x 1 in. (80 x 70 x 2.5 cm).

The direction that my paintings have taken, naturally aroused my curiosity in new media and inevitably led me to begin exploring the world of Digital Content Creation.

I had squeezed every last drop out of my old system, so a few months ago, I built myself a new-generation Quad Core system with plenty of RAM, decent graphics capability and sufficient room for future expansion, should the need arise.

I am particularly fascinated by organic mesh modeling and have been using myself, my family, and my good old anatomy books as reference to practice modeling in 3D. After some good practice, it starts to become rather intuitive, and then the addiction sets in…

The following example shows a few stages in modeling process. The result, a polygonal model of my own hand, using only quads to form the hand topology, shown here with two levels of subdivision. The completed base model will later be textured with colour and normal maps to add more detail, then rigged and skinned for posing and animation. All modeling was done in Blender, using a pen tablet.