Developer Comment by Sandro Benigno on August 3, 2010 at 4:27am

Hello, guys!
Thank you for the comments. :)

@Xander. I'm using Lightwave3D. The great deal of 3D is all the ways you can use it. All we can see and touch now on the real life frame was carefully tested by Jani with 3D parts on Scketchup (like... width and height of slots, possible positioning, etc). But it isn't all... we are using for instructional pictures (without the limitations of depth-of-field, undesirable angles and barrel distortions, etc). We are using it to develop illustrated packages, it can be sent to some eventual publication of the project as well, etc. Everything is possible due to this detailing and not only functional low-poly.

All I'm trying to say is that all parts was done step-by-step along the project and so, now we can join all parts and go forward with illustrations like those ones for every sort of thing that we need to. And over all, it's my way to return the great things that I learn here every day with you all at this great community.

@David: Thank you by your interest on my job. I'm on the road with 3D jobs since 1993. Today, I run a small business company that work with digital signage projects (advertising players, software and content). Maybe we can do your suggested post about frame concept and production with help of the masters Jani and Ken McEwan. Let's give the project a time to be definitively stored at DIYD's and we can make a kind of "behind the scenes" post. :)

Good point about the wires. In real life I'm sure it will be protected by a heat-shrink or something like it. In fact the intention of this type of mounting is protect the cable, not only a stylish thing. The loop at the end of arms make it much more exposed on eventual crashes (it can cause short and may cut the wires off by one single event).

Developer Comment by Sandro Benigno on August 3, 2010 at 5:22am

@Ravi: Animate and modeling those things with natural look is really hard, but a little more practice always help us to develop some techniques for doing it. The way is... there are always a more simple way for doing complex things. You just need to find it.

@Juan: I always create my own libraries for surface material by observation of a lot of photos. In ray-traced solutions, some knowledge about physics help us a lot to create more "real look" aspects. Understand some things like Fresnel reflections, refraction-index and subsurface-scattering will give you some advantage to reach quickly certain details. (Legal você ter morado por aqui. São Paulo é muito agitado pra mim.
Gosto muito aqui de Belo Horizonte, que é uma capital com o "pé na roça"). :P

@Fab. We planed to share low-poly converted versions of all the boards and other objects. It will be done at ArduCopter project's resources, probably on wiki. So all the people of our community will have this additional resource for using on their own projects. ;)

Comment by Juan Soler on August 3, 2010 at 6:15am

I figured you had been developing your materials. I too run LightWave, (v9.0) I just love the modeller - I use it with k3dsurf to model mathematical surfaces when I get a bit of time to play.
(Eu também vivido em Rio Grande do Sul. No passado Eu usava Maya, Max , Soft Image e agora Eu tenho lightwave também mas Eu não obtenho grande quantidade de tempo para jogar. Eu costumava animar para filme e anuncio mas agora Eu trabalho na industria telefonica com IT.)

Comment by Ken McEwan on August 3, 2010 at 6:52am

Juan, eu não sabia que você falou Português. Você é um cara muito talentoso. Você fala australiano?

Ken

JDrones Comment by Jani Hirvinen on August 3, 2010 at 9:20am

@David, yes even on reallife they do go inside just like in this picture. But edges of holes are rounded so there is no sharp edges that do cut insulation of wires. Naturally inspection now and then for insulation is good to do no matter are they outside or inside. If people want to put them other way around eg. from end of the tube, that can be one too. Just turn motors 180°. Tho bending cables like that and putting them inside from end of tubes creates unwanted forces to cable connection points inside motor.

I have now been flying with test ArduCopter around 10 hours and no signs of wearing off... If user want to have extra protection, cover insulation from normal silicon wire is good to put around hole. U shape is more than enough due cables touches aluminum only from one end of entry/exit holes.

Comment by David Ankers on August 3, 2010 at 9:56am

Glad you have that covered, frames are looking very very nice, awesome work.

@Fab, this might be useful: http://www.vuedehaut.fr/Quadri/3d.html

Just looking at Lightwave, stunning application, I did a lot of 3D studio back when it ran on DOS but not touched 3D since then.

Its the render in LightWave that rocks.
They also seem to have some cool examples and tutorials on their site as well.

I am very interested how you did all of the circuit boards, I know you said you did not use Eagle3D in the past and did them all by hand. However, would it not be possible to just use Eagle3D, but instead of rendering with Povray convert the models Lightwave with something like 3DWin, touch up the materials and textures and use the much more powerful Lightwave render?

Just a thought as hand modelling all those traces must have taken ages, they are perfect and would have be so time consuming. Just thinking out loud on maybe a way to do this in a shorter time?

Developer Comment by Sandro Benigno on August 3, 2010 at 10:26am

@David, Eagle 3D only exports scripted scenes for POV RAY. So, POV uses a library of scripted objects for render it. The object are constructed at render time. And what happens if you have a particular parts as the piano dip-switch, the SM06B connector or a specific pressure sensor, etc. So, you will spend a long... long time scripting it by yourself or modeling it and importing as mesh, etc. 3DWin, PoseRay and others only work with mesh data, not the scripted objects. You can read it at POV site on the official "Knowledgebase":

"POV-Ray describes most of its objects as mathematical entities while most of other renderers just handle triangles (or NURBS or similar easily tesselable primitives). A converter would have to make some tesselation in order to convert most POV-Ray primitives to other formats. This can be a quite laborious job for a converter to make (it would have to practically implement an almost fully-qualified POV-Ray renderer).

This is why making a full-featured converter from any POV-file to any other format is an almost impossible task."

This was taken from that page:
http://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:Files_and_formats#Topic_6

Comment by David Ankers on August 3, 2010 at 10:51am

Aha, that makes sense, so to put it in a simple way, the objects are not really real but are parsed and drawn by a script. They will not exist as just models to simply be exported, to make a model somehow the script needs to be parsed first as they are not models yet. Oh well. Certainly an area I have no clue about.

The time and skill you have put in to your work is so impressive, it really is just like a photo.

Developer Comment by Mark Colwell on August 3, 2010 at 12:51pm

Thanks for your wonderful work! You should be documenting assembly of satellites or medical equipment!
Can you publish User rational 3D model?

Developer Comment by Sandro Benigno on August 3, 2010 at 3:46pm

Thank you Mark! Satellites are subject for another member of ArduCopter team: Ken MacEwan. :P

The current plan is to share low-poly objects converted into Google Sketchup format. We'll share the DIYD's boards model and other 3D objects used by the team along the project. So, users would use it for other projects or for create other frame concepts and all sort of things. :)

Maybe we can do it by another interchangeable format, like Collada or OBJ. Which file format do you consider more useful or "user rational", like you said?

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