The 80's called, and they want their technology back - 3D ZX Spectrum (work in progress)

With a couple of days off work, and with nothing better to do yesterday morning, I decided to snap a pile of photo's of my old ZX Spectrum (the one from my earlier posting).

Orthographic photo's of the old girl...

I made a start yesterday on this model of the ZX Spectrum.  Its around 6 hours of work in total for the modeling, with a majority of the case/keys taking roughly 4 hours - the modeling is now 99% completed.

The case, keys and cover plate all modeled in around 4 hours

No guts, no glory...

The inside of the machine I don't plan on modeling in detail - the few components I did model are purely to give the inside some detail when rendered, to prevent it appearing to be an empty shell.  There is a generic spectrum PCB photograph used to texture the base of the PCB model, but it'll be tweaked and edited for the final model.

That last 1% of modeling is simply for the rubber feet below the machine, however that's literally it.  A pretty easy model to build in general.

The next phase is obviously texturing and surfacing, before then lighting and rendering the model realistically.

Added the 'guts', along with a little detailing of components.

Why, oh why do you do it Kev??

I model these things out of both interest in the subject, as well as just plain enjoying the relaxation of working on 3D projects.  Its no different then someone painting or playing a musical instrument.  A lot of the time, my personal projects are done to simply keep my mind busy (ie. when I get bored)

I'll post updates again once I'm done with the textures and rendering.  For now, here's the start of a fun project.

I also took a pile of snaps of the Atari 600XL - as I'd modeled the cartridge for it already (post on the blog), then I thought I might give the machine a bash at some later stage.