(Group Project) Week 2 - Presentation week

*This is an individual post as a response to the progress up to and after the Presentation on the Thursday*

Aaron and Richard began their roles by creating the wooden pillar stands and beginnings of the pump's floorplate and the modelling of the 24" diameter flywheel, essentially in preparation to display them on the Sildeshow to give an example of early progress and design intentions

I decided to create a crucial part of the pump, albeit smaller in scale than the other members sections - by creating a simple nut-and-threaded-bolt that can be edited for future use, it is also useful for 'Cloning' and 'Replicating' it throughout the model's various stages

 To design the nut, it was a case of creating a 'Cylinder' with a radius of 2.5cm (remembering to double-check the parameters of the Max file before I created it), height and cap segments at 5 and reducing the sides down to 7, 'Morphing' the cylinder to this form here

 

Under 'Extended Primitives', there is the object classed as 'Hose', which I knew would be ideal from which to create the threaded bolt

Various parameters were altered including the percentage start and ending falloff of the spiral-hosing and I needed to modify the width and sides of the hose shape so that it would scale up against the nut

As I had kept all scaling close, all I needed to do next was to place the threaded-bolt against the nut as displayed here - in the top right window, both are shown with the same amount of sides, which was intentional in order to maintain the form of the objects when the bolt is needed to 'Boolean-Out' the nut

The Presentation

As a whole group, we all had a part in describing and justifying our progress and design decisions since we visited the Museum

One particular slide we included was to list the possible problems that we may come across during the modelling process: items such as keeping to the set scale, motion capturing, as well as the general quality and timing of the animation in keeping with setting created

One aspect that we focused on afterwards was further research into the past uses of the steam pump and its assigned locations throughout its working life

Some sites of interest include:  

http://www.steampumps.net/JosephEvansReliable.html

http://www.bedwascolliery.co.uk/contents.html

http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/forum/read.php?4,3832