Lego Duplo

After reading the brief I decided to tackle the youngest age group, LEGO 'Yumyums'. This is the 2-4 age category and is a based around the parent and child day trip, encouraging the child to experiment with there food. Since this is the youngest age group it requires the younger type of LEGO, 'Duplo'.
Lego Duplo is basically like a regular lego brick. Except, it's enlarged. This makes sure that kids won't be able to swallow it. Like all other lego bricks, it is made out of ABS Plastic (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene.) This brick has a high melting point. Which is why, under extreme heat and flames, it only turns into a black-smoke colour. ABS Plastic can be found in components of a car too, hence why it is a hard material and an expensive brick.

Basic LEGO Duplo Set

After alot of searching I came to the conclusion that no kind soul has posted dimensions of the Duplo figure, so off the the toy shop I went to buy the cheapest set that had a range of different types of bricks and a figure included. Before I got out the vernier callipers I couldn't resist playing about with the bricks so I documented how the bricks all slot together to build a house.

Duplo Dimensions

I've finally the time to sit down and measure some of the Duplo bricks and the figure. The Duplo figure was quite tricky because of it's size, not to mention the amount of measurements I had to take as well. With these dimensions I should be able to recreate them in 3D Max.

Basic LEGO Figure Head

A render of a basic LEGO figure head I made in class. It's an example of using the lathe tool to create a basic geometry of which a polygon model can be made from. Creating it wasn't too difficult, there was the usual hiccups that can happen when using 3D Max but all in all it was fairly straight forward.
I would have liked to have had eyes and a mouth on the head but I'm not sure how to go about it, most likely it's the material editor. A task for another day.

Final Drinks Bottle Renders

Above is my proposed bottle design, after many different concepts I settled on this simple, sleek sports bottle design. I also proposed a new nozzle as I think the suggested sports nozzle has a few issues; 

• You have to pull the top up to drink, this can be awkward while running or if you don't have a free hand. Usually you have to pull it with your teeth. 
• The nozzle has a hard edge and isn't as comfortable to drink from as I think it should be.

To improve upon these issues I made the nozzle larger, more rounded and combined it with Lucozade's sport nozzle (this type of nozzle allows you to squirt the liquid by squeezing the bottle) so that you don't have to pull the top up to drink.

As for the bottle it's self I want a bottle design that covered both the sporty and professional women so that the bottle wouldn't look out of place in either situation. Due to time constraints and my 3D Max abilities I wasn't able to construct an accurate enough bottle so I scanned in a sketch and painted it on Photoshop.

Basic 3D Bottle

Above is a render of a bottle I made following the tutorial in class. Following the tutorial is fine but when I wanted my bottle to be a different shape I found that I just made a mess of it. So I just stuck to the simple design...

Mobile Phone Render

Scaling proportions on a human body was at times tedious and annoying, modelling a mobile phone however...

Surprisingly I found modelling the phone much easier to do than the Anthropometrical assignment posted earlier. Maybe it is easier to do or maybe I'm becoming a bit more knowledgeable on the in's and out's of 3Ds Max. I'm hoping it's the latter...

Above I've shown some quick renders of the phone, it's modelled fairly similarly to my HTC Wildfire incase someone thinks I'm ripping of designs. Overall I'm pretty happy with the result, I couldn't get the material editor to work properly for me to apply realistic textures to the phone but that's something to improve on for next time.

Anthropometrical Headache.

Screenshot from 3D Max

It's been many an hour of tedious tinkering and minor frustrations but I managed to produce a CAD drawing of myself. I'd love to say it was made from scratch but it wasn't... I modified the proportions of a 95%-ile male to fit my own proportions using 26 different measurements. The 95%-ile male is standing in the middle with a front and side view of myself to the right & left.

Even though it took a long time to finally get it done, about 50% of my time was spent getting to grips with the program. Gradually overtime my workflow got faster and I got more comfortable working with 3D Max. The proportions look relatively correct and look fairly similar to my actual proportions so I'm pleased with the end result!