It's a long time since I've posted. I have been busy with a new project which even I consider slightly eccentric. I'm in the early stages of designing a steam motorbike.
I have started to learn a free computer aided design programme called FreeCAD. It is far from intuitive, it is in English but oft times I am driven to the conclusion that English it may be but not English as I know it. Like Blender, before I can enjoy using it I have to become competent and fastish. I am hoping to have the front wheel drawn up by the weekend, a water tube boiler will follow and then the real test will be a small compound double acting engine or possibly a uniflow to start with.
I have been using a standard model to learn which keys to press for what. This Turners Cube was constructed by creating sketches on a cube extruding or padding them then using the little blighters to create pockets..........all eighteen of them. It would be much faster to create a stepped cylinder then position it on the cube and perform a Boolean operation. I can do one face but not the other five.
This is it in FreeCAD. I can add materials this is supposed to be aluminium. I decided to export it to Blender, that took an hour of messing till I found a file format that worked. (obj.) extensions do the trick.
After importing it to Blender I gave it a quick plastic looking material then animated it. The ten second animation was a bit large for YouTube so I popped it into Handbrake and compressed it from 1.5GB to 1.3MB. All this software is free. Here is the result.
I have started to learn a free computer aided design programme called FreeCAD. It is far from intuitive, it is in English but oft times I am driven to the conclusion that English it may be but not English as I know it. Like Blender, before I can enjoy using it I have to become competent and fastish. I am hoping to have the front wheel drawn up by the weekend, a water tube boiler will follow and then the real test will be a small compound double acting engine or possibly a uniflow to start with.
I have been using a standard model to learn which keys to press for what. This Turners Cube was constructed by creating sketches on a cube extruding or padding them then using the little blighters to create pockets..........all eighteen of them. It would be much faster to create a stepped cylinder then position it on the cube and perform a Boolean operation. I can do one face but not the other five.
After importing it to Blender I gave it a quick plastic looking material then animated it. The ten second animation was a bit large for YouTube so I popped it into Handbrake and compressed it from 1.5GB to 1.3MB. All this software is free. Here is the result.
I think that's all for today.
