Syngress commissioned me to design a Lego power drill for the cover of the "Lego Software Power Tools" book (by Kevin Clague and Miguel Agullo) - their idea was that is should be a derivation of the ubiquitous "Unix Power Tools" cover. I thought the idea was excellent and set to work on the model, which prove quite tricky. There are certain archetypes on a power drill, and capturing them well in a Lego context eluded me for some time until I found inspiration in the Lego version of Jango Fett's Slave I spaceship! A render I did recently is shown below; the model also existed in real Lego, but was somewhat multicoloured. Below that is a copy the actual cover of the Syngress book, on which the drill image was rendered by Miguel Agullo.
The above image was rendered using the ray tracing software POV-Ray with radiosity enabled. I tweaked the colours quite a bit; the blue is not exactly Lego blue, but I thought it looked quite drill-like. The rubber effect on the tyre was created by giving the finish very little reflections and a lot of diffuse lighting. You can download the POV-Ray settings I used here.
