Home

Virtual Tonka Toy Jeeps


 
For a while now, some of us have been having some fun photographing toy Jeeps against real world backgrounds. It's another way of appreciating the craftsmanship that goes into a nice model, or just seeing the toy in a new way.

Steve Mark of Kansas City has taken this idea a step further, by creating a virtual 3D model of a Tonka Toy Jeep, whose color, position and size can be manipulated on screen, before it is placed into a background photo.

Click on any of Steve's pictures for a large version (100K) suitable for use as an 800x600 desktop picture.

Virtual 3D Working primarily from the side view photo on the Dispatcher Details page, Steve created a wire frame 3D model (seen behind the Tonkas here) which can be rotated into any position. It is then given details, color and lighting, and rendered to produce a final version which can be placed in front of a background.
 

Army Tonka Steve says, "The programs used to create the digital pictures, were Adobe Illustrator 5.5, Adobe Dimensions 2.0, and Adobe Photoshop 3.0. The images were created on a Power Macintosh G3/266, with 416 megs of RAM, a Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5P, and a Sony DCR-TRV320 digital camcorder, with memory stick. High resolution versions of the digital images were created at 300 dpi. The bigger files are 25-30 megs each. You can still use old software and a 4 year old Macintosh, to create really nice images."
 

Snowplow Tonka "Everything in this picture is virtual, even the snow. Its was a lot of fun playing with, on a cold winter's day in the midwest! The Jeeps are not exact dupes, because of the limitations of the 3-D program, and the processing time to render it out," comments Steve, who has obviously played with a few real Tonkas in his time.
 

Beach Tonka "Here's a drawing of a 3-D Tonka on the beach. I really like the lighting on this one. All of the photo backgrounds are out of Jeep catalogs. There is a real Jeep Wrangler hidden behind the virtual Jeep in this photo."

See also a huge version of this photo (170K JPEG) suitable for a 1024x768 desktop picture.
 
Thanks to Steve Mark for the great illustrations. -- Derek Redmond

See more Virtual Tonkas: the Fire Pumper and the AA Wrecker.


See also some real Tonka Toy Jeeps on The CJ3B Page.

Return to the Toy Jeeps Pages.


CJ3B Home | Site Map | Search | Movies | Bulletin Board


Last updated 12 January 2002 by Derek Redmond redmond@queensu.ca
http://www.film.queensu.ca/CJ3B/Toys/VirtualTonkas.html
All content not credited and previously copyright, is copyright Derek Redmond