Toon Tank

September 5, 2020 by mattbooty

I started this small project last summer (July 2019) and worked on it intermittently in small time chunks for about a year. At the time I started, I had cartoon tanks on the brain, inspired by things like the Meng Models World War Toons line, old video games like Metal Slug and the plastic army playsets of my childhood. The idea of a cartoony tank that might fight Godzilla in a 1960s cartoon seemed fun to me. The 3D modeling […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration, Everything Else • Tags: #3dprinting, #3dstudiomax, tank

Photo Flight with Planes of Fame F-86F Sabre

June 4, 2020 by mattbooty

Recently I was fortunate to go on a photo flight flown by pilot and photographer Scott Slocum to shoot the North American F-86F Sabre jet flown by Steve Hinton from the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California. A big thank you to Steve Hinton and POF for this amazing opportunity and for artful flying that makes it possible for us photographers to get the shots we want. More photos on instagram @mattbootyphoto Planes of Fame posted two videos of […]

Categories: Aviation • Tags: #airtoair, #aviation, #f86, #fighterjet, #jet, #planesoffame, #sabre

Creating a VR Spaceship Bridge in Unity

January 28, 2019 by mattbooty

The combination of the HTC Vive VR headset, the Unity 3D game engine and the SteamVR library from Valve make for a great virtual reality playground. I wanted a short project to get more fluent with all three so I decided to make a VR spaceship bridge, a digital environment that would be small enough to keep the project reasonably sized and would steer clear of characters and animation, two things with which I don’t have much experience. The Art […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration • Tags: #Alien, #conceptart, #RonCobb, #spaceship, #Unity, #VR

Air to Air Photography – 2018 Year in Review

January 22, 2019 by mattbooty

Each year, as a way to share my work, stay in touch with friends, and say “thank you” to all the pilots and crews, I produce a calendar of some of my photos from the year. Here are the photos in this year’s 2018 calendar, along with some information about each aircraft. 2018 was filled with fun travel across the country chasing photo opportunities, most organized by photo pilot Scott Slocum (www.air2airadventures.com). For the first time, this year’s photos combined […]

Categories: Aviation • Tags: #airplanes, #airtoair, #canon, #photography, #warbirds, Aviation

3D Printing a Model of Mount Rainier Using Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Files

January 20, 2019 by mattbooty

My friend Rich — an experienced climber who has climbed Rainier, Hood and Denali — had an idea to make small desktop models of famous mountains. At the time, I thought “easy enough” and over the holiday break I decided to tackle this as a 3D printing project. This post is about some of the things I learned along the way, and a it’s a bit of a journey from “how hard could it be” to “easier said than done”. […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration

T-17 Tank Project

December 21, 2017 by mattbooty

I plan around enough time to complete one 3D modeling, printing and building project a year (like last year’s sci-fi tank), and this year it was another futuristic tank. They’re fun to model and build, and the surface smoothness achievable in 3D-printed ABS plastic from Shapeways makes sense for something rough like a tank. For this project, I wanted to better adhere to the 1:35 scale commonly used in commercial military model kits so that I could incorporate figures, and […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration

Sci-Fi Tank (Part Three)

March 27, 2016 by mattbooty

In Part One, I showed the CG design process using Autodesk 3D Studio Max. Then in Part Two, I talked about getting the parts back from the Shapeways 3D printing service. Now, let’s do some painting and weathering! Here are the individual 3D printed pieces with a coat of gray primer. I like to use Tamiya Fine Surface Primer. I don’t have a spray booth or airbrush set up, so I do all my painting with spray cans and brushes, […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration

Sci-Fi Tank (Part Two)

March 15, 2016 by mattbooty

In Part One, I showed how I used Autodesk 3D Studio Max to design a sci-fi inspired tank for 3D printing. Now let’s check out how the actual 3D printing turned out. I really like the Shapeways printing service. The tools on their website for checking and organizing your STL files are useful and reliable, their customer service team answers emails intelligently and are very helpful, the quality of the 3D printing itself is as good as anything I’ve seen […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration • Tags: 3D printing, model, shapeways, tank

Sci-Fi Tank (Part One)

February 20, 2016 by mattbooty

My latest 3D design and printing project is a sci-fi “futuristic tank”. It’s probably more accurately described as an armored scout vehicle, but I wanted to design something with a lot parts and detail that could be made in 1:35 scale so that figures and equipment from commercial plastic model kits could be used as accessories. I also just like the look of oversized tires on military vehicles. Finally, I wanted to try out the new “polished” material available from […]

Categories: 3D Design and Illustration • Tags: 3D printing, model, shapeways, tank