Week 8

This week I created the other half of the 'V' engine by Mirroring my initial model of the piston block. To do this I simply selected both part of the model and made a copy of them. These copies were then mirrored by adding a Mirror modifier from the modifier panel. All that I had to do after this was to position the mirrored copies on the opposing side of the engine body.

In addition to the body of the engine which I started last week I added another box shape towards the front of the engine. After raising the polygon count I converted this box into a editable poly. I picked points in vertex mode to create a half cylinder shape from the bottom of the box. Once happy with this I added a mesh smooth modifier to round off all the sharp edges. The Smooth modifier makes the shape look more organic and realistic.



In the second half of the week I continued with the model by creating the visible section of the crankshaft and its housing. This part of the engine is very detailed and I wanted to be able to spend a fair amount of time getting the shapes and modelling fairly accurate. The starting shapes of this part of the model were: three cones, a cylinder and a tube.

I started with the biggest part of the setup. This is where all of the gears that drive the crankshaft are housed. The basic shape is a cone, but I have altered it by raising the polygon count and applying and edit poly modifier. By selecting the faces on the underside of the cone I was able to create a bulge below the main housing. I had to make sure to retain symmetry whilst modelling this section. This shape that I created was effective in itself so I left the modelling there and applied a smooth modifier.

The rest of the shapes remain virtually un-touched, but for a few tweaks on the other two cone shapes. These were altered slightly using an edit poly modifier.