Here a model I have been working on. You see an overview of the steampunk trike and some closeups of various details.
I’m very content with the gearbox. The only thing I would like to add is a clutch. Make a nice view of the plates and the springs pushing them together. The lever sticking out is going to be connected to a dead men’s shift.
The piston has a rig to extract the rod. The mesh and bone are grouped and linked from another file. The trike requires two pistons, thus I added two instances. Unfortunately the proxy from the first instance controls both meshes. This is not what I would like to see. The pistons should be moving independently from one another, any ideas how to do this?
The leather for the seat is a slightly modified version of the leather material uploaded by Marcus Fenix on the Open Material Repository, which again originated from: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=83329.
I can’t remember what exactly I have done for the trike. It does not really matter as it can be deleted. To find the problem I have done some tests.
I took an empty blend file and linked the group piston, which includes the armature. Pressed the space bar and added the group twice. Made a proxy while the first piston was selected and another with the second selected. The result was proxy no. 1 controlling both meshes while proxy no. 2 was doing nothing.
In the next test I’ve linked in the group, added an instance of the piston and duplicated it. Next I made a proxy for the original and one for the copy. Same result.
Third test, linked the piston group and added an instance. Made a proxy and parented it to the piston mesh. Duplicated both at the same time which resulted in the second proxy controlling both meshes.
My conclusion: I do not understand proxies. Can any body explain what is happening or what should be done.
Looks great, pretty impressive detail. My only comment would be that the tire treads look too modern for the rest of the trike. Look forward to seeing it all textured up.
maxharley: I presume you mean the method I used to create the frame.
I have used curves which I manipulated in 3d. Starting out with a single bezier curve or circle, I added more in edit mode. The colors indicate the different curves. Finally the bevel depth was set and you will get the tubes.
The joints are made by hand. I moved the ends of the curves until the result was satisfying. A handy trick in case you want to join two curves: have one curve altering rods (those purple things, don’t know there formal name) of each curve snapped to the same grid point. By doing this you only have to worry about the desired angle.
The frame is centered around the x-axis. In the case of individual curves; I created the left side first after which I made a duplicate. This duplicated was scaled over the y-axis by a factor of -1. In this way it is mirror perfectly so you don’t have to find the correct position on both sides.
I should not that when zooming in very closely on some points the inefficiencies of this method can be seen.
Another update on the WIP. I’ve made some control handles to be mounted on the handle bars.
A pulley with a (not yet visible) cable controls the brake/gas.
