Group Project Part 4 - Animation

After adding materials and bump mapping to our models, I have now animated the middle piece. There are a couple of minor issues with the render since I had attempted to use Curve Editor to loop the animation, and when it comes to the end it pauses for a brief moment before repeating.

Anyway, here's what we have:

Group Project Part 3 - Pieces Coming Together

Steven here, with my middle piece of the boiler pump. I've done a bit more to it, adding more parts as my guesswork alone is teaching me how the machine works, giving me a much clearer idea of how it should be coming together.



This is what it looked like last night, before I started adding more pieces, applying meshsmooth to one or two parts and changing the colours from something you'd see in Toytown to match the appearance of the actual machine:



It's looking much better now, but there are still a few more details I need to add before I start animating the swivels and pistons. Aside from what's lacking at this moment in time, I'm very pleased with how it looks so far.

Craig seems to have finished his left part of the machine, and I think he's done a pretty good job. He's also recoloured it to match the paint job that the boiler pump has, and this is the result:



I have to say that I'm quite impressed with the model as a whole, especially the amount of detail that he's put in.

Now, it's time to bring these two parts together to create two thirds of the boiler pump! So with mine and Craig's modelling powers combined, we have...



...discovered that our models are completely out of scale with each other. We have both been using centimetres as our measuring unit in 3DS Max, but my part is stupidly oversized, whereas Craig has been working with the correct scale of the real life boiler pump. So, it's now time to shrink my piece down to the right size and bring the two together...



Although there are a few minor niggles like overlapping pieces and some colours not quite matching, it's starting to come together quite nicely. Keep a look out for my next entry as I apply finishing touches to my middle piece, and start adding some realistic materials to our models.

Group Project Part 2 - Progress So Far

For this group project, my own task involves modelling and animating this particular section of Arthur Mumford's pump, circled in the photo below:

This part features swivels which are seemingly attached to clamps that move a pair of pistons back and forth. And by "seemingly", I mean that I can't clearly tell whether or not they are actually attached just by looking at the photos (I was never able to visit the museum myself, so a lot of guess work has to be done by me). Presumably, the swivels on the sides actually push the clamps attached to the pistons back and forth without actually being attached to them:



Look where the arrow is pointing. The swivel doesn't appear to actually be attached to the clamp, and the part where the arrow points to appears to have had a load of paint scratched off over time. So at the moment, this is the only lead I've got as to how this part works.

Here's what I've modelled so far:



I started out by modelling the main body of this section (the part in gold), which I did by making a box, adjusting the size and number of faces as I needed, and extruding the faces in order to match the proportions of the actual machine. From there I added more shapes for the various parts of the machine, with a bit more work going into the swivels and the clamp holding the pistons.

I will use modifiers to smooth it all out when I feel the time is right, but I want to complete the modelling process fist. There is still one little bit that I'm currently stuck on...



These two joints. And I have no idea how they work or how they move, so it seems that there's plenty of guess work for me to do.