Month: April 2015

Trebuchet, part III – moving parts

Now that the frame is complete and ready to print, as seen in Part 2, it’s time to do the moving parts. This is a very good place to show you the Blender 3D Cursor in operation, because I will not be designing with exact dimensions, but rather with exact locations and approximate dimensions.

The 3D cursor is the thing that moves around the screen, when you click the left mouse button. You can place it with nice precision, when you use the views that are flat, ie. Top, Left, or Right, because then the cursor moves in only two dimensions. Placing the cursor in the User Perspective view is really hard, unless you snap the cursor onto something – most of the time it is not even possible. I’ll show you what I mean.

Continue reading Trebuchet, part III – moving parts

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Trebuchet, or counterweight catapult, part II

I will now try to take you through the design of the trebuchet which has been shown in Part I of this post. This description that follows is actually aimed at showing you how in Blender all design is based on very simple starting points. The trebuchet frame is based on a single circle, the hole in which the main axis will eventually be placed, with a diameter of one Blender unit. Around this circle I based an octagon with the same center, but with a diameter of three.

The first circle
The first circle

The octagon is an arbitrary decision. I could have taken a septagon or a nonagon, but decided to go with eight vertices. It looks like this when appended to the circle above: Continue reading Trebuchet, or counterweight catapult, part II

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Greetings from Denmark

This blog entry comes from Copenhagen. Our university, Haaga-Helia, has for ten years been involved in an international IT seminar for students, and this year’s seminar is #9 in the series (2013 was such a messy year for all participating universities that we decided to skip it that year). The other schools are Cphbusiness in Copenhagen, Universidad Europea de Madrid from Spain, and a new entry this year, HES-SO from Switzerland.

The structure of the seminar is always the same, as is the theme, “How to be an IT professional”. The seminar runs for a week, with every school hosting a day. Usually there is a lecture in the morning, and then a workshop before lunch to be continued into the afternoon. Many times we have had social events and a business visit, for example last year in Helsinki we took the Spårakoff beer tram and went to Remedy Entertainment to see how games are made. Continue reading Greetings from Denmark

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