some more renders of my wiimote in Blender 3D. Enjoy.

Okay, maybe not a final, final render, but I think except for some tweaks here and there, it’s pretty much done. There are some things I can do, which you’d never see, so I think I’ll skip doing them. Maybe it’s lazy, but this being my first Blender 3D project I’m pretty damn content with the way it turned out. It’s probably not the most efficiently modeled 3D object and the texturing is half-assed, but it looks damn good.

For those interested, I used subdivision surfaces and except for the four lights on the bottom of the wiimote, everything else is actually one mesh — the face plate, the entire body of the wiimote, everything. One mesh. It was hard working with the subdivision surfaces at times because it likes everything to be rounded and things on the wiimote’s faceplate have sharper corners. In retrospect maybe I should have found some different way to do the faceplate, making the holes for all the buttons proved to be quite an undertaking and resulted in creating a lot of the edge loops around the wiimote mesh. I wanted to try and capture as much of the geometry of the wiimote as possible. I think I succeeded. I’ll post a montage rendering of the wiimote in various positions. For tonight, you get this:

I’m back in the bay area today. Nice weather we’re having. I’ve been watching it part of last week — there were supposed to be thunderstorms in San Francisco. Yesterday, I started my journey back home around 3 am. The flight from Philadelphia to Chicago, no problem. In Chicago I learned they downsized the plane for whatever reason but I got onboard. When we reached San Francisco all I could see were peaks of the Golden Gate bridge and the rest of was just a dense white fog. No visibility, but our intrepid pilot decided to try and land anyway. Turbulence all the way and the passengers were upchucking the five dollar “snack packs” that United sold us a couple of hours ago. Just as we were fifty feet off the ground we sudden pulled up and skipped SFO all together. We didn’t learn till later that there was a sudden gust of wind (a freak one-in-a-million chance according to our pilot) that caused us to pull away. In San Jose we did a “gas and go” and a bunch of disgruntled and ill passengers opted to get off the plane ( at their own expense — United wasn’t going to off load their baggage and they were on their own to get to SFO). We landed though and I got home. Then the clouds broke and the sun shone down on the newly washed and cleansed Earth. What a day.

Today…I spent the last day of my vacation being somewhat industrious. Blender’s really piqued my interest in 3D modeling again. So after a day of work, here’s what I have: an almost complete, untextured Nintendo Wiimote. I did it using images I found off the Internets and modeled the entire thing with subdivision surfaces. Throughout my entire marathon modeling session, Blender didn’t once throw a fit or crash. Amazing. trueSpace or Martin Hash would have crashed a hundred times by now.

Reference Image (I used photoshop and cut it up into a front, top, and side view and discarded the ones I didn’t use):

A shitty render of my modeling work (I’ve got to learn how to set up lights and render better):

Enjoy! I need food and lots of TV now. Back to work tomorrow…