...In Stilo Est Perfectum...

...The pen... is finished...

After hours of mixing measures of radius with measures of diameters and forgetting the fundamentals of basic math, the reverse engineered, manually digitized model of my pen is finally done.

 

(Wire-frame and half-rendered views of all the parts of the pen)

I'm not going to lie, I had originally chosen the pen as my object to reverse engineer and digitize in Rhino because I had somewhat believed it to be a fairly simple, straightforward object to render, but oh I was wrong...

Deciding to keep true to the object and attempt to recreate even the small details (some of which were necessary, as a majority of the pen body is transparent)-- let's just say a pen is a surprisingly complex object, in its own way.

 Anyways, the process was still quite enjoyable, and the skills learned and practiced invaluable. My understanding of the processes and abilities of Rhino has grown considerably and I feel quite comfortable with many of its tools and functions.

  

(Man, was it ever fun to start putting all the separate components together and finally see the pen taking shape)

Lining everything up was fairly simple; setting Osnap to centre and matching up the ends that way. Everything seemed to fit together snugly, so forwards onto rendering...

Setting up the material layers was fairly simple, as I had already been using layer management techniques quite frequently to organize the construction lines and such during the initial build of the pen form, so it wasn't a far stretch to then assign materials to said layers.

(Quick and dirty render using the render view mode)

Then came the actual render....

I believe I rendered it at 350 or 400 DPI, because the computer I had been using would threaten to crash whenever I attempted rendering it at 600 DPI.

Even so, my goodness, did rendering this little beastie take forever...

I had some trouble getting the material properties for a few of the translucent pieces correct so the internal details would show through, but after a bit of fiddling, I think it looks fairly... clear plasticy... which I then went on to almost ruin with my terrible light set up, but oh well...

Looks like a pen to me, and I'm quite happy with the results.