Ion Source
By John Robbins.
Author
Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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Nice! Awesome use of the anisotropic shader.
I like it. But what is it?
Exactly what I was thinking.
The ion source is part of an isotope ratio mass spectrometer, which takes gas evolved from a sample (usually carbon dioxide) and ionizes it by hitting it with electrons. The nodes and leads that you see coming out of the large base provide the energy to the plates, which focus the ion beam and send it down a flight tube, not pictured here. I’ll probably end up modeling more of the IRMS as time permits, but this is the most interesting looking part of the system.
As for the shader, I learned it from Andrew Price’s awesome tutorial. Thanks for the comments!
Cool!
That’s a bit more specific than I expected, but very interesting. Are you doing this as part of a paid job for some manufacturer/researchers or is it something you do because your inner geek tells you it must be done?
A bit of both actually. I work with these machines in my day job, and do video and 3d stuff in my spare time, and I always wanted to combine the two. I have a potential client to do just this sort of thing, and this was a result of a test build that I made for them. I figured while I was at it I would share it with the community!