Lethbridge Wind Gauge

By James Henry

I have decided to use Blender to produce a high quality ray traced image. I started this project using POVRay however, I ran into difficulty with creating the fixture that the chain attaches to. After switching to Blender a lot of my time was spent again on creating the fixture. The fixture is made up of joining 2 "Tube" objects then flatting and shrinking different points of the tube. The chain that connects the ball to the fixture is made up of a series of boxes and then rounding over the corners. The texture on the fixture and chain is a cloud texture with a brown undertone. This is to resemble wear and weather damage on the fixture. The ball is a simple sphere with added texture. The ground on which the wind gauge sits is a plane with a grass texture added. I found the grass texture from: http://www.blender3d.org/_media/education/quickstart/Texturing_Castle.html. The sky is actually a large tube, with added texture, that surrounds the entire scene. The building in the background is the visitor's information building.

This was a very exciting project. Looking back the only thing I would have changed was to use Blender from the very beginning.

Hope you enjoy!