PUMP JACK

by Matt Sawdon

I decided to pick a pump jack for my model and blender as the program I would use to model it. After this I faced what would turn out to be the hardest part of this project, just starting it. Blender is not an easy program to just jump into and I spent a good deal of time looking at tutorials, eventualy I found a good tutorial on wikipedia called "Noob to Pro".

I quickly realized that source material would be extreamly usefull. Since I did not wish to go out of town and find a pump jack and proceed to take pictures of it I turned to the internet. Sadly most of the pictures were from only one angle (which is not the best for creating a 3d image) and usualy focused on things other than exposing the minute details. Luckily I found a extreamly good diagram by a maker of pump jacks Weatherford . The exact page I took the diagrams from can be found here . Using the print screen comand and paint I quickly produced the following pictures:

After finding a source I could finaly get to actualy modeling the pump jack. I found that haveing the side view of the pump jack on the background was usefull. I also found that having a second screen open was usefull so I could see the x,y, and z axises all at once my setup usulay looked like this:

Everything contunued at a steady pace while there are a lot of small bits in the back they were not exeptionaly hard. Eventualy I ended up with this:

Then I had to texture it which ended up being difficult to say the least. I ended up making the pump jack a shiney metalic color that looks okay although it is fairly unrealistic. I then added some text to the side of the pump jack to match the image. Finaly I thought of adding grass by using blenders ability to add fur to an object. I made a large flat sphere and gave it green fur wich turned out quite nicely. Heres how it looked in the end:

click here to see more images of my pump jack.