Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The engines part 2: A finish product

The engines... As stated in the previous blog, the engine contains a lot of different parts and details. Most details needed to be homemade as I wanted to put a lot of depth into the making of the ship.
To the left you have a picture of the engine shell that will be containing the fuel apparatus, the cooling system and the 3 engines. The 2 big engines will be mounted on the exterior of the lower half of the engine shell.

I used to have picture of the process of the 2 main engines, but last weekend, I decided to upgrade the OS of my Iphone to version 5 and I lost all my pictures, contact list and every thing else because the backup did not want to install itself correctly. But here is a description of what was done and in later images, you'll be able to see what I am talking about. When you look at the skin of the main engines, you seem to see something that could look like the rotating fins of an big plane engine. I tried to recreate those fins by cutting a lot of long small pieces of card-stock and coloring them. I then added a piece above it all to cover the fins from the top. I've also added a few pieces to the front of the engine to add dimension.
To the left you have a image of the finish engines along with the one of the two main engines. I've also added my human size mannequin called "Bob". Bob is also present in the right image containing a finger pointing at the 3 fuel tubes to show there size. As mentioned in a previous blog, when using LEDs to light up the ship, if I do not paint the interior black, you get light that bleed true the material. Bellow is an image of the painted interior. I'll probably wont paint the whole interior because I'll stop the light from spreading putting aluminium foil.

To finish this blog, you have 2 pictures of the finish engine in their full 3D beauty if you are able to do cross eyes to look at it. If you want to see more images of the finished engines, you can go to my deviant art page or go to the Tristan section on the page.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

The engines part 1: Details details details

The engines.... The engines are full of details and composed of multiple components. They're composed of the 3 small engines, the fuel apparatus and the cooling section behind the 3 engines and the 2 main engines on the side of the engine shell. To the left, a modified screenshot of the engines from the pepakura software to show it's grandeur..
In this blog, I'll focus only on the 3 small engines, the fuel apparatus and the cooling apparatus. In a following blog, I'll be putting all the parts together to have the full engine.

In the upper right side, you have the 3 small engines. The top right image contains the flat printed on paper engine graphics and the 3D version of the engine. The right image contains the 3D engine inside its engine case. I made them by cutting round pieces of card stock of different sizes and by embossing them by rubbing them with the rounded end of a knitting needle in the palm of my hand.

The fuel apparatus, that I've named, brings with its 3 fuel tubes fuel to the 3 engines above. As for all the other parts, your imagination is as good as mine to figure out what they do. The tubes are "ugly", but they are very small. I should have taken a picture with a finger beside it or my human paper equivalent to show their size. the left image is from pepakura and shows the details I tried to replicate. The left one contains the start of the scaffolding. The picture bellow is an attempt to show the 3Dness of the the finish product by using cross eye vision.

The engine cooling apparatus is behind the 3 small engines. Because it's much hidden behind the 3 engines, my guess is that it was some kind of remnant of the artistic design before the engines got added. Or it was made that way to add some depth to the engines...  I think it's some kind of cooling apparatus because it looks like cooling vents on big building.
Anyway, the 5 images around represent the evolution of the cooling
apparatus from the 2d version to it's 3D version. I had a lot of fun putting in some depth to the things on each side. Take care all.