I have begun a project to create the Terex Titan, a prototype haul truck (for mining), that when it was built, it was the largest truck in the world. It has since been surpassed by the Cat 797 and a few others, but it still remains as the largest tandem-axle truck.
Currently, I have completed the meshes for the wheels. Take a look at the images below. The materials are still very basic.
These wheels are over 3 metres high, to understand the scale here.
All the smaller details on the wheels are separate.
How it works is the main wheel rim itself is done with a screw modifier. Looking at a bunch of references, I made up this cross-section of vertices and edges:
For the other details, they are modelled and then arrayed in a circle with the use of an array modifier (and an object offset targeting a rotated empty).
I just remembered, I haven’t actually got all the details in place. There are a couple of cutouts which I will just make with the boolean modifier (delete a some of these arrayed parts). It is really easy to change because of how I set up the scene. I only realised this recently, but Blender can make instanced collections. What I did was move parts into their own collections, so the tyre by itself is in one, and there are two other collections for the entire front and back wheels.
The wheels set up in the pictures in the first post are all instances of the front and back wheel collections, and these two collections contain instances of the tyre collection. Changing the original changes everything else.
I plan on animating it and doing some basic movements, so instances help more with organisation here too.
In the wireframe image, there are actually five separate objects for the rear wheels and three for the front.
Looking at the rear (closest) wheel in the image, there is one whole mesh for the tyre rubber. This is one object made from a circular array.
The inner part if the wheel (rim and metal structure) is one mesh, and is one object.
Small details like nuts are part of separate objects.
The front is simpler, because I only use an object for the tyre, one for the metal rim, and one for the nuts.
So, while it all looks to be one object and one connected mesh, it is actually multiple meshes across multiple objects.
I will try to post some more images later showing it clearly.
