Now that I’ve finished a REALLY big complicated model, I’m going to do a much smaller and simpler one. I found this GIF animation and was so fascinated by it that I wanted to make my own rendition of the device.
I thought it would be easier to model the gears with NURBS instead of polies and I want to learn MoI, so I’m using that to model with. I plan on rendering with Indigo, so I guess you could call this a 3rd party project.:o Blender will still be used to export to Indigo of course.
A few months ago I challenged people to design four gears fitting inside a fifth gear. Andreas Röver took up the challenge. The sketch below and this gear animation shows some of Andreas’ results. Andreas realised quickly that it would be hard or even impossible to find a solution that would result in an exact fit. In an exact solutions, the gears would fit perfectly and mesh perfectly. Instead, Andreas developped an algorithm that searches for approximate solution. Andreas found several criteria which a solution would satisfy, like a maximum mis-mesh of x%, gears not having common denominators and gears fitting “nicely” together. Finally, Andreas performed a quasi-random search for good-enough solutions. The resulting gear arrangements look quite nice. The Looney Gear animation demonstrates how they can rotate as a set of planetary gears, albeit quite asymmetrical. Two questions remain. 1) Do exact solutions exist, or only appromiate ones? 2) Do these Looney Gears have any useful applications?
Have you looked at Blender Mechanical Gears by Stefano Selleri. It will produce a correct gear involute profile. You may need to run it on Blender 2.34 though.
That is amazing! you could animate them by first creating a circlular curves for each individual gear to follow. Then just animate their rotation. Does that make any sence?
excuse my ignorance but what is mol? btw, looks amazing though maybe too much noise, and not enough AA on the final image. Also maybe a little randomness in the brushing of the outer gear.
MoI (Moment of Inspiration) is a NURBS modeling application. It’s in a free beta test phase right now, but after another release or two it will be for money. (Around $200.) link
My render is noisy because I used Indigo and only let it go for 30 minutes, a longer render would have been cleaner.
It’s a spherical HDR probe I converted to lat/long EXR. It’s the fourth one on this page. I tried Uffizi at first, but I was a lot happier with the results from this one.
24 hour render with .003 bump as opposed to .007.
[Edit] Also, I’m using linear tonemapping as opposed to Reinhard.
WOW!!!:eek: That took you 24 hours to render?! You must be very patient. So are you going to animate it? Obvously you wouldn’t be using the same quality as you did in your image.