I figured it was about time I started posting my work and since I’ve got the week off for Thanksgiving, here it is. This is what I have so far of a 10cm 30 Caliber Railgun. It will be used by space-going warships to put up a flack shield as well as add some extra hurtting to smaller ships. I plan for this to eventually be a twin-gun mount, although I’m not sure if each gun will have an independent trunion or not.
Anyway this is the untextured modeling stage with AO turned on since I’m too lazy to set up lighting. The gun setup pretty much speaks for itself. There is an ammunition chute on the right side, a small maintanence hatch on the top, and a heat sink on the bottom. Ignore the weird black streak on the right side of the gun. It has been corrected.
Some of the views feature my rough human, Crewman Mike (thanks makehuman), and a 10cm shell for comparison.
All critiques, questions, comments, and expostualtions are welcome.
I changed a few details on the gun itself, but most of my time has been spent making the deck lugs and arranging them so that I will have room for an ammo feed. The base of the turret is alot bigger than I thought it would be, a full 2.2 meters. That means I’ll probably go back latter and make a single mount for the smaller ships.
As for the deck lugs themselves, they are pretty simple, sturdy shapes. The caps on the lugs each have 4 bolts and 2 tapered holes for alignment pins (haven’t made the pins yet). To save space, I gave them a common lug in the middle, but they still have seperate bearings and trunnions so that if one gun breaks down, it wont jam up the other.
P.S. does anyone know of a good tutorial for flexible hoses?
Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with this thread, but school temporarily got in my way. Anyway, when I started to model the feeding systems I noticed a few critical flaws with my design, so I have started a new one. If you dont care about the design stuff, then skip the next paragraph.
This one will use a magazine that is easily reloaded instead of a system with a constant ammo feed. My current plan is to have the gun fire 10 rounds then elevate to 90 degrees where an ammo hoist will reload the rotary magazine (you might notice some similarities to a revolver pistol). The magazine will be on a spline and linked to the barrel. That way, the magazine will follow the barrel through its recoil and counter-recoil process and always have a small gap between the magazine and the barrel (so no ramps or anything like that will have to be pushed into and out of position each time to fire).
So far I have made the base shape for the gun, slide, and magazine. My next steps are going to be making the recoil brake and recuporator in the slide as well as making an electric motor for rotating the magazine and a pnuematic piston for firing.
Here is my latest update of the railgun. I have modeled the cylinders for the recoil brake and the recuporator. I still need to make air and oil charging valves for both cylinders though. I also realized that the spline was much bulkier than it needed to be, so I have scaled it down from 20 centimeters in diameter to 10 centimeters in diameter.
I still need to design something to rotate the spline. Right now I am thinking of a electronic or hydraulic motor connected directly to the spline. I would like to keep the motor directly on the end of the spline so I dont have to add another object (the gear) to the model, but I can if necessary. I would really appreciate input on the rotation motor.
Here is my latest update for yall. I decided to use an electric motor to turn the magazine by use of a worm gear (it recently occoured to me that the gear would be in a housing so I wouldn’t have to model it). I’m not to sure if the size of my motor is right, but I figure that it will work since the speed is geared down quite a bit.
I remade the slide in order to help accomidate for some beveling and in the process I changed the overall shape a little bit. I still have the original slide sitting off camera, so I’d like to hear yall’s opinions on which shape looks better (or if it doesnt really seem to make a difference).
Well the Christams rush is over so I am back to designing my railgun. I have decided that the fuse for my shells will be optically activated, so I am using a fuse setter with laser and a fiber optic cable in my pnumatic piston.
I have made the head and shaft of the pnumatic piston as well as trunnions on the slide and washers for my bolts. I also beefed up the electric motor a bit. For now, I want to finish up the piston and start modeling the mounting.
@Photoguy: Crewman Mike is probably not going to be seen in any movies, I am just using him for scale. Therefore, I see no need to force him to cover up his manly muscles.
@bluetygr: I must admit that it looks pretty conventional at this stage, but I hope to make it more railgunish when I add the electrical cables to the barrel and stuff. As for the shell, it is far from final. I plan to make two types of projectiles: one basically the same shape as you see now for large explosive payloads and stuff and the other type of shell will be a penetrator shell with a sabot. I would like to keep the round shape for handling reasons, but other than that, I am open to suggestions.
Here are my latest improvements. I have made the piston to my satisfaction and I am working on the pneumatic hoses.
I have decided its time to make the mount and here is what I have so far. I modeled the deck lug with its berring cap and I am currently experimenting with defferent elevation gear arangments. I also redesigned the way the electric motor is mounted to the worm gear housing.
For some strange reason, blender is giving me a false vert count. According to it, this model has 156,000 verts. Anyone know whats causing this? I haven’t used subsurf anywhere. The only vert changing modifier I used was a decimate one when I made the hoses.
Looks more like normal gun to me. For one i would love to see the barrel to have some sort of feeling that there are strong currents running in it… now it looks like its stolen from some Russian T34…
Indeed. I too don’t understand why Blender devs give us horrible defaults, like the dark blue background and the pink texture color. It seems like they are left that way to remind/force you to change them anyway, which IMO beats the purpose of defaults. I almost always use a white background for tests with AO.
The default background is bad… got it. I’ve been working on the barrel and I was gonna save it till I made a little more progress on it, but after checking this thread and seeing it’s become the biggest crit, I’ll go ahead and post what I have. When I start materialing, the barrel will primarily be a ceramic (dont like its brittle quality but it doesnt conduct) with copper rails. The odd bits on the side of the barrel are where the power cables will go.
I was figuring that to animate the various cables and hoses I would need to use a string of armatures with IK solver but I’m not sure how well that will work out. Does anyone have a reliable alternative way of doing it?
After quite a few failed attempts, I’ve managed to model the heavy cables and and bundle them into a reasonable shape. I’m still trying to refine my system for animating cables and hoses. Armatures have quite a few bugs (parenting from bone heat doesn’t seem to work well with this large bundle).
Also, does anyone know how I can prevent meshes from twisting when using a path?
