The Wheel, Humpty, and my Bed

The Baby Wheel, in extreme perspective!

This plastic wheel made jangling noises, and is probably my earliest memory ever, not counting the time my head came off and my parents took me to the doctor to have it reinstalled.  The wheel had four colored spheres embedded in its decorative network of struts or clown faces or whatever it was.  These sphere held object that rattled or jingled.  I was so curious to know what is inside that could make those sounds, I wanted to peek inside.  These were magic mystery orbs, and I wanted to know what made them work.

How to see inside?  I stood on my bed and held the wheel up high.  Then I let it drop, hoping for it to break and the mysterious contents, probably magic gems from another planet, would be revealed.

As I was dropping it for third time, Mom walks by the door and notices my investigation.  I am requested to stop, and so my research went on hold until I was old enough to take things apart carfully and use glue to reassemble them.  By then, though, I was no longer interested in that toy.

So there’s one of my earliest memories ever: Taking something apart out of curiosity and getting busted for it!

The most exquisitely beautiful object in the known universe!

From the same early time I also remember this Humpty Dumpty doll with red yarn hair.   Perhaps my mom made it, or some aunt, or perhaps it came from a store.  For some reason, I didn’t like it that much, at least that’s wrote I wrote in my notes back when I was in grad school.  Did it have a tie, or was it buttons?  That detail is fuzzy, but much of this doll is clear in memory.

Providing a place to rest for both those ancient toys is my bed, designed and built by my Dad.  It had openings on three sides for storage.  The side opening visible in the image had a shelf, and held my clothes.  The big opening at the foot of the bed held larger toys, or maybe more clothes.  As far as I know that bed continued to exist well past grad school, into the 21st Century.  Maybe my mom took it when she moved into her new house in 2003.

Very early toys and my bed

These images were created in Blender 2.61, with Humpty’s cheesy artwork created in Inkscape.  This work was quite educational, as I found the best way, or at least a not-so-bad way, to make dimples in the mattress, and to make realistic shapes for the wheel’s decorative structures.  I don’t think it was really all circles stuck together, but maybe there were animal shapes or circus clowns embedded in there.

Humpty was especially tricky to make look like it’s cloth.  It would help to have small wrinkles along where the seam would be, but alas my 3D modeling and UV texture mapping skills are not yet refined enough to do that well.  As it is, it looks too tensed up, like a balloon full of air. A few wrinkles and broad shallow dimples will help that.

The bed went together quite easily.  Just a rectangle, add a few loop cuts to allow a rectangular opening to be punched out, and adding elements for the curved opening and posts. The carpet is not like it really was; it’s just a photo of where I lived in Socorro NM last year.

But I must stop modeling and lighting, since life pulls on me to do other things.  Someday I’ll refine this scene, but it could be several weeks before I get to it.

Mountain-Turning Game

This probably belonged to my sister, if it wasn’t in the generic family games collection.   We had several board games.  This one was more fun than average, due to the central plastic “mountain” that the players could turn under certain conditions, thereby messing up the travel plans of everyone’s pieces.  A pair of dice determined the number of step a player could take, as in most board games.  I don’t recall whether or not there were cards with oddball instructions like some other games had.

We had two transparent die, one red and one green, which found plenty of use for all games that didn’t have their own dice in the box.  I remember them clearly.

I couldn’t find any information about this game online.  Maker = unknown, title = unknown, what exactly was written along the paths = unknown.  I’m quite sure “Psycho Leprechaun” wasn’t actually a part of the game, but lacking sufficient good memory for a more accurate replication of the game, I had to fill the space with something    Anyway, if you, my blog visitor, remember this game, please leave a comment to enlighten the ignorant.

There was some kind of cartoony artwork filling the non-path spaces of the playing board.  Seems like it was nature-oriented, had fantasy people such as  elves or  leprechauns, maybe a castle, horses… or maybe I’m way off.  This was back in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The details aren’t exactly fresh in my mind, although I do remember the look and feel of the green plastic mountain, the dice, and some other physical details.
These images were created using the Blender 2.61 modeler, Inkscape for the board artwork, and GIMP for various image processing tasks such as making the white paths more scruffy and painterly looking.   By no means was the actual game as clean and pure, bright and shiny as this 3D looks.  We played it often.  If I weren’t busy with other things like studying semiconductor physics and writing math and physics articles, I’d spend more time dirtying up this scene.  Fray the cardboard box corners, add subtle fingerprints and scruffy marks to everything, a bit of crud in some of the dice pips, and hints of CMYK halftoning  in the playing board image.

Yow, making the dice in 3D was an adventure!  I found several tutorials online, of which this <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Die_Easy_2> (there’s a video at ) was best, but before doing things the obviously most productive by following one of those toots, I had a go at it by making it up as I went along.  I thought that maybe the mirror modifier would speed the mesh modeling process.  Perhaps it would be best to create nine pips on every side initially, by making one pip all by itself, duplicating it 3×3 to be the central part of a face, and then duplicating that six times with 90 degree rotations.  Finally I’d delete the unneeded pips and replace the hole with a simple flat fill-in mesh face.  Well, long story short, that was tedious, slow, error prone, and looked bad in the end.  While following the tutorial, I learned a few techniques that I didn’t know or had forgotten from two years ago.  Especially quicker, easier edge loop selection and removal.  More skill, more 3D power… more and better 3D toy images for future posts!

A view of the game in its entirety

 

 

Overhead view shows poorly remembered details of playing board. Well, not poorly rememered - just plain made up!

“Toys I Had” Begins!

This blog is where I’ll be posting 3D renderings, 2D artwork and information about toys I remember from when I was a kid.

Modeling toys with 3DCG is fun, and a good starting point for interesting artwork.  Since my childhood years were long ago, my memory may not be entirely accurate in all details.  We will see how close I can come. I will tell fun stories about things that happened involving these toys.   In the 3D artwork, I’ll sometimes attempt to capture the style and look of things in the 1960s.  Sometimes I won’t.  Expect variety.   This is an art projects and limited autobiography, not journalism or decent reference material.

In some cases, the “toys” aren’t exactly toys, but something of interest to me in my single-digit or teen years.  (Or maybe yesterday.)   Some of these toys are of interest to collectors.   Some have been long forgotten, or for all I know, figments of my imagination.  In fact, I may put up a fake toy now and then just for fun, hee hee.  There might be an occasional post about some toy I didn’t have, perhaps even a guest post with someone else’s toy story.

In any case, I am not myself a collector or pay attention to that world, but certainly there is the possibility of exchange of information and images.

The crude first draft of this series started when I started the PhD program in Physics at Indiana University.  After classwork was done, I’d spend a half hour each evening making up a page with fast crude sketches of two or three toys and typewritten text describing them and any incidents of note.  Just for fun.   It was interesting to recall what toys I had, what I had forgotten all about but recalled after seeing a cousin’s kid receive an xmas present, or seeing something somewhere that reminded me.

After a while I put the dozen or so pages into a cheap binder and shelved it.  Now with the internet and blogging, combined with my lackitude of working on my personal website, I’d like to put some of this online, new and improved, for the entertainment and interest of others, and to show off my 3D skills.

This blog will link to, and I hope from, other blogs and sites about toys from all decades, and show ads to toy companies and related sites.  I invite links to pages and blogs by others with more information, photos, and artwork about the toys I show here.