I really like that new barrel.
Dude! This thing is starting to look WICKED AWESOME!
Are using a a bezier extrusion or mesh deform? If you are, simply make sure that your path curve is 3D enabled and and then select the center vert of the control set at which the unwanted twisting is occuring. Hit T-KEY and then begin moving your curser around in a circular motion centered on the vert. Try circling both ways until the twisting goes away. You may have to adjust this at all the verts to get it just right but it doesn’t have to be exact if the mesh is circular-cylindrical. All your basically doing is rotating the normal of the bezier’s plane around the bezier itself.
This is SUPPOSED to work 
Of course, if i misunderstood you, you can ignore me an call me an idiot 
Hi Sharper, your gun is looking pretty nice. Would you mind posting a few wireframes - I’m always interested in the topo of nice models like this ? Cheers,
Here are a few messy wireframes. If you need, I can disassemble the gun (all of the motors and housings and stuff are seperate vert groups) and provide you with wireframes of that.
I have no clue how to do this “mesh deform” method you speak of. I used paths to create all of my hoses and cables. Anyway, I have the twisting problem more or less under control, but I now have a bigger problem. As you can see by the non-wireframe picture, the armatures and thus the hoses tend to wrinkle up when I elevate the gun.
The animated hoses/cables are really getting to be a problem. Since I need to have some decent results by the end of Jan, I am considering not animating the hoses for now so I can material this beast and then get back to animation when I am happy with the materials.
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Sooo…whatever happened to this?
Sorry about the loss of updates. Things got busy for awhile and when I picked up the project again, I never started repsosting it. Anyway, it started out as a project just for fun, but then came the opportunity to use it as a school thing. So with a bit of a deadline, I had to work around the stupid cable problems (although I think Robbur might have a method for animating cables/hoses, I look forward to his tractor tutorial). So anyway, here’s what it looked like after a simple paint job. Also, an animation of it can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxSBG-tLOlo In case any of you are wondering… that soundtrack was stolen from the game Sub Command.
For now I believe I will call this project finished. I could go alot further with it (especially on the texturing front) but I am not satisfied with the overall design. The trunnions are too long and have the possiblity of bending after serious use. Making the magazine recoil with the gun causes unncessary wear and tear. Mainly though, I need to come up with a more orderly way of providing power to the rails.
Since it is in my nature to enjoy desiging things, you will all probably see another railgun a short way down the road. My primary project right now, however, is a small spacecraft-to-spacecraft shuttle. Perhaps I will start a thread on it withen the next few days.
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Sweet. Yeah, texturing would be cool, but if your done for now, that’s cool.
As to future guns with less messy power cables, I think your getting rail guns and coils guns confused (I could be totally wrong here). Coil guns have a series of indepentently wired low-inductance coils running up th barrel. Current is pulsed into the coils sequentially such that any given coil is active only as long as the projectile remains behind it. In this case you would need a bajillian cables for all the differenct coils. Rail guns on the other hand work by taking advantage of the interaction between the magnetic field generated along the coils and the current running through the projectil (or in some cases, a thruster plasma). The field generated by the coils is orthogonal to the length of the barrel and the current through the projectile (which is perpendicular to the length of the barrel) and therefore exerts a force on the electrons in the projetile (right-hand rule). Rail guns (I think) should only need two leads: a (+) for one rail and a (-) for the other. So I don’t think you really need all those wires (I think).
If this doesn’t make sense, Wikipedia has decent articles on both types of weapon
I think that the railgun has the most potential as a future weapon. Becuase of the simplicity of the system, you can dump in as much current as your rails can take.
I am indeed modeling a railgun. There are only two contacts, positive and negative, but in order to really send the ordanance out at high speed alot of power is needed. Its simply easier to use a wire bundle to deliver that power than to use one really massive wire. Look at some of the pictures on the test railgun made by BAE Systems for the US Navy. They have loads of cables.
Oooh, gotcha. Well, at least you don’t have to have them running down the length of the barrel…
I had them running down the barrel because that provided the most space. But what you are saying is a major design consideration for my next one. This gun was designed with everything else first and cables just sort of slapped on at the last minute. The next one will account for the cables from the start. I am just trying to figure out exactly where to put them and how to make them move.
PS Thanks for all the crits and comments, its really helpful.