Reply To: Collab 2020: Modeling Heavy Equipment (Backhoe)
Sorry for the radio silence, guys!
Here’s this month’s detail work. I’m a little anxious that it might be visually underwhelming, and I’m glad Kent set a minimum of 25% completion, because there was a whole lot of work to do for what might not look like much visual progress since my initial block:
Because of the design inconsistencies I mentioned last month, I ended up having to reblock all the major components from scratch – AGAIN! I had hoped I could just use the first blocks that I made and maybe just simplify the mesh and reshape them, but no dice there sadly as the correct pieces were ultimately just too different. It soaked up a lot of time to build all that again, but on the plus side I am much happier with my topology this time around.
The only components from my first month that I was able to actually reuse were the hydraulic cylinders. But, I did give them a work-over to clean up some topology issues especially around the vertical “round” parts – I had not made a very good intersecting cut with my first blockout – and I retooled the surface to make it more closely match the cylinders in my reference photos.
But at any rate, with all of this work, basically almost all of the major and minor hard-surface parts are done for this part. But, there’s still plenty of work to go. I estimate that at least two-thirds of the remaining work I have to do is going to be hydraulic apparatus – hoses, pipes, and fittings, and the small brackets that hold all of them. There is a LOT of it. It’s like someone just dumped a whole basket of snakes into the back of the backhoe. Really big snakes. But, I’m confident it’s nothing I can’t handle and I’m looking forward to it!
@adrian2301, I know that you’ve made a lot of progress on the frame, but all I have is the original one that came with Kent’s stream 2 download, so I don’t know if you’ve changed anything around this part or even if you’ve been waiting for me, so I only have this request with regard to your frame: if you can, I’d like you to raise the lower-most “slide rail” (that’s what I’ve decided to call it) just an inch or so, enough so that it clears this part:
You can see where it intersects the small “ledge” that sticks out the back of my slide-frame there. Raise the whole rail if you can, because each of the two rails AFAIK should be the same height top to bottom. I think you should be able to raise it just enough to clear that, without intersecting the hydraulic cylinder above; if there’s problems, I can address them afterwards. That’s the only change needed on my end!
@theluthier I think you’ll probably need to move your digger arm so that the bottom hinge pin lines up with the holes on the swing-frame, and that’s pretty much it. There shouldn’t be any design changes needed from either of us by this point. The bottom end of your boom’s piston should clamp on to the upper hinge pin. You can probably just rotate and move the piston itself rather than the whole boom to make it fit. Unless you want the “latches” on top of the swing-frame to be engaged with the small cross-pin there – it’s up to you, and you can just rotate the latches as needed if so – if I need to do any remodeling of the latches to get them to fit right just let me know. The latches are only supposed to be engaged when the digger arm is “stowed”, so if you’re modeling the arm to be extended in any way I suppose they would stay unlocked.
The blend file is in my OneDrive if anyone wants it – it’s the “swing_frame_02” file. @pfbourassa I’d love to make it into your reel if there’s time!
It’s been so awesome watching the progress everyone is making. I feel like finding that site with the part drawings is like my biggest community contribution since I’ve joined CGCookie. 🙂
We’re on a roll everyone, let’s keep it going!