Creating the Engine

We got together and divided the engine up into 5 parts to give one to each of us.

Many pictures were taken, however in every picture; there is another bit of the engine in the way. This could be a problem for me as I will never see how it’s put together clearly.

To create my object I opened up 3dsMax, brought up a new page and started with the sphere. To do this I focused on the top view port. I created a sphere, turned it into an editable poly, cloned it and by using the scale tool, made the cloned sphere bigger by dragging up on the mouse.

Now that there are two spheres I cut the top and bottom off the second larger sphere, leaving just the centre of the sphere, in the middle and around the first sphere. This looked like the effect of Saturn, a ring around sphere.

Now to join the first sphere to the second. I selected the top window, and selected vertex (after making them both editable polys) I selected the vertex nearest the sphere in the middle and individually using the snap tool attached each vertex to all the centre sphere verticies. Once I had done this it looked like the image below. I then had to change the view point to bottom, so the bottom of the sphere can be joined as well as the top side. Now I had an image which was like the photo of the steam engine part.

After making it, I found a problem. I played around with this a lot as linking the vertices from the outer ring to the centre sphere was not as easy as I first thought. It looked like it was done correctly until it was smoothed at the end. Even when I tried doing this part again, it was smoothing out too much.

To make the tube that went into the green ball it was a simple tube. At the top of the tube there was a bolt inside. This was created by creating a octagon, and extruding it to make it thicker. This then simply slid into the brown tube, which slid into the top of the green ball.

The image has two tube and balls that stick out of it. Like the image below, These were made by creating one of them, by attaching another tube to a sphere again, I stuck the tube in the centre of the ball , by doing it this way I didn’t have to attach the vertex. I made sure it was exactly in the centre by looking at it from the Top view.

Once one of them was created it could be cloned for the second. The two objects are inside the big ball so I deleted some polygons at both sides of the sphere so they could fit in.

I applied a mesh smooth to the ball.

As well as the ball there needed to be a smooth bottom like a neck. This was very difficult as I couldn't get tit to look smooth for a while. I created a tube, and made it thicker at the top by using the scale tool, and I made it go thinner in the middle then got it to get slighter bigger as the base. This was fiddly, yet when I got it in the right position, using the snap to and attach tool I made it look like the tube was attached to the sphere, and I was rather pleased with it.

This is what it looked like when I put the right colours on the objects and put the tubes through the gaps in the big ball.

For the next part I had to create the bit that join together. This was done by many tubes and rectangles. The rectangle below when smoothed using nurms, and mesh smooth, made the exact look ~I was going for. This took a lot of time to realise, and was after alot of playing about, with iterations etc. This is the before:

and this is the after:

As you can see this technique makes the shape look much better and exactly what I was going for.

I struggled with creating this part :

For the next shape, I created a large square, and cut it up into many sections. This allowed me to cut parts of it out and re attach the vertex of needed parts together. This object was very hard to see as compared with the other parts this is the smallest part to create, so being amongst all the bigger part, when moving , the pictures we took weren't getting it all as good as if it was stopped, and we could have got much nearer to it.

The last piece of my object was more simple objects, there was a box below which was made by creating a place, and rounding of the corners. I then cloned it so there were two faces, and joined the two faces together by creating the two sides. I found the attach and snap tool very useful when doing this.

For the bottom legs, I did the same as earlier, I needed rounded corners to a L shaped object.I created a L shape using A Place and Extruding it. I made it into many segments so I could play around with it. I then added a Mesh Shooth and gave it 5 iterations, this is what gave it its smoothness, in the image below you can see the difference between both the smoothed, and normal .

I used more tubes which go into my L shapes these in the pictures were like poles.

Tools I used the most

I used the attach tool alot when editing images and puttign them together. I made every object I created in to an editable poly, and mesh smoothed every object apart from the tubes (used as poles)