[37] L'lasons de Aether ver Beinags #19

Yeah, I was stuck again, and while I dislike asking for most forms of help, I can usually recognize when that practice is unequivocally inefficient and counterproductive.

Again, I asked for help and I received.

Before that, though, I created an extension to the drill body to house the main driver gear:

First, I extruded the top part to look like this.

Next, I hollowed out the midsection of that extrusion.

After which, I filled in the necessary gaps.

I also reduced the height of the legs overall, to accommodate the length of the drill shaft:

I was at a loss of what to do in terms of the gear setup of the drill shaft and how to actually model it, as my solution a certain problem involves modeling a gear type not included in the addon I use to generate them in the first place.

It's well within my capabilities to model rotational motion, as I can use size and teeth ratios to determine their relation, but the problem I'm running into trouble with is linear motion.

This linear motion I'd like to use for the raising and lowering of the drill head.

This addon can generate worm gears and regular gears of just about any type you can imagine, but what I have in my head involves a linear gear matched with a normal one.

This is called a rack and pinion, as shown here:

For the drill to spin on one axis and realistically raise and lower on a separate linear one, I could make the teeth rack (drill shaft) circular.

Here's a sketch of what I mean by that.

The tricky part with this is making a ratio of angular to linear movement based on the size and tooth count of the adjoining pinion (the circular gear in the above gif,)

and modeling it to be proportionally correct.

The drill is supposed to be powered by some crystal, or crystal-like substance, and the crux of at least part of the puzzle involves it. The crystal pulses at a certain interval, whose form is akin to a laser when visualized. That crux I speak of might involve focusing the crystal's otherwise unfocused power. To do that, there needs to be something to facilitate it, and the simplest way I thought of is with mirrors.

I had a hard time thinking of the form those mirrors would take, so I asked Vives about it, and he sent this sketch:

He didn't explicitly say this was a set of gimbals, but this is most definitely a set of gimbals.

Using this design would likely simplify a lot of the animation and whatnot of this specific thing, as I'd only have to rotate some components on a single axis, influenced by the previous gimbal.

I haven't implemented this as of yet, though.

When thinking of ways to create the crystal itself, I was reminded of this option called "Rock Generator" in the 'new mesh' menu, so I tinkered with some of its settings, and got this:

I really like this, though its striations and edges remind me of something more like volcanic glass than an actual mineral crystal.

The only problem is that this had way too high of a polygon count, clocking in at 49152 triangles, which is impractical on a game-wide scale, especially for such a small object.

I don't know if the method I used to reduce polygon count can be described as retopology or not. What I did was apply a decimate modifier to drastically reduce geometry automatically, before manually removing any artifacts and merging vertices that were either unnecessary or I just didn't want.

The result was this:

This one prioritizes those cool sharp edges, while taking up less than 600 triangles.

The only reason I stopped is because at some point I was like 'I really don't want to merge vertices for another few hours.'

That's it for this week.