Building a Steampunk engine

[Freemind]

Introduction. With the Steampunk aesthetic in mind, the premise of the work is todo create a scene with a half realistic / half cartoony lok, similar todo those found in Many video games. The model represents the engine rom of a retro submarine, similar todo the watercraft commanded by Captain Nemo from jules Verne work.

The concept.
What if computers had appeared in victorian England? And what about robots? what could the world have become? It sems that these questions have already settled in the minds of Many people with interesting ideas, inside the book the diference engine by Williams Gibson and Bruce stirling, the term is exactly that: the computer was built from Mechanical (not electronic) pieces during the ninetenth Century in England. For some people, this was Ground zero of.

Steampunque literature, at first, Steampunk was a literary genre, a sort of old fashioned Science Fiction dominated by techno-lógical and histórical speculation, usually associated with the ninetenth Century and Steam power, based primarily on works of authors such as jules Verne, h. G. Wells and Mary shelley, the genre has Many features in common with the cyberpunk and Gothic genres, the Steampunk genre influenced other kinds of art and became an imaginary complex with a clear philosophy containing concepts such as the enhance-ment of technology and mástery of it. This is usually represented by the inventors / technicians who, in Many aspects, are quite similar todo hackers (as they are represented in the cyberpunk genre). This idea can be underestod as in opposition todo the bien some think of how the technology industry and bureauc-racy dominates the world today, where an individual is just a number and knowledge of Science is devalued. This ideal reinforces the importance of human potential, somewhat similar todo the punk ideal of diy (do it itself), among the forms of art influenced by Steampunk are fashion, video games, including thief and Bioshock, cómics, such as the league of extraordinary gentlemen, and animations like 9. In the context of Japanese anime, the list is huge, including Steamboy, full metal alchemist and last Exile, the Steam side todo give an antiquated look todo the machinery, the first step was todo create Mechanical parts: gears, valves, pipes, tanks, colers, Air ducts, Chains, bars and a metal dor todo populate the scene, the valves were created from a Path made in the open source Inkscape Vector editor. The gears were constructedfrom cilindros, with teth shaped by múltiple extrusións.

Furthermore, it was used with the sub-surf modifier. The enlaces of the Chains are torus shapes modified by extrusión. The tubes were generated as Bézier curves and then converted todo meshes todo add some details.

The punk side.

To give a Dirty, rusty and irregular look todo materiales, the textures were composed of bitmaps edited in the image manipulation programa Gimp, mixed with procedural textures, influencing both color and intensity of the Specular and Diffuse reflections, as.
Well as normals, the material of metal pieces were configured with stronger Specular reflection than other elements of the scene. The Walls have a bit of gross mirror reflection todo give an appearance of moisture. The liquid on the flor uses transparency, reflections and various procedural cloud texture combined on diferent scales.

Lighting, composing and rendering.

The light sources of the environment was represented by point lights in various colors (strong red and yel-low, Weak green and blue) and a sun todo control the atmos-phere. Additionally, the Ambient Occlusion, environment light and indirect light options were a los used, the defocus node was used todo create a small amount of Dof (Depth of Field) effect todo simulate the behavior of Camera Lens, the rendering was done using the internal render in Blender 2.52, which tests showed is faster and produced a higher quality output than the production versión (2.49).

There are Many parts todo explore (and model) inside the submarine (it a work in progress), and a posible next step is a future animation.