Boiler Pump Environment

The sequence of images below show the creation of a room, styled to appear like that of a cellar in a large house or industrial building. The intial construction of the room began with four walls, a celing and floor. From here objects were created to fill the environment. consisting of the following:

- Hot water tank (basic cylinder then modelled, rusted metal texture bitmap)

- Toolbox (two chamfer boxes, with extruded sections for form the handle and lock, bitmap applied)

- Spanner (modelled from a basic box with a reflective metal texture applied)

- Shelf unit (box shapes, with applied bitmaps and textures)

- Copper pipes (created as individual assemblies consisting of cylinders with extruded sections to form the flanges and bolts. A coppery texture was created using a yellow based phong material with a smoke map. Bolts used a silver metal texture)

- air cooler box (basic chamfer box with a plastic coloured white material, fan blades created as extruded ellipses and grouped together. vents are flat sections with a rusted metal texture)

- shovel (modelled box and cylinders with applied textures)

- Stairs (standard stair shape from 3dsmax with applied bitmap)

Lighting was created using mental ray omni lights. two directed through the windows into the cellar and a further light located above the stairs. The foreground of the room was left clear to enable space for the boiler pump and to allow it to form the focal point of the room.

Render prior to insertion of the boiler pump

4th Stage after consultation with the group

3rd stage with initially applied lighting

2nd Stage

1st Stage

Animation

After adding materials and bump mapping to our models, I have now animated the middle piece. There are a couple of minor issues with the render since I had attempted to use Curve Editor to loop the animation, and when it comes to the end it pauses for a brief moment before repeating.

Anyway, here's what we have:

Boiler Pump, Two Thirds Complete

Here are a few screen shots of mine and Steven's models together. As you can see, the pump is really starting to come to life. All we need now is Ryan's side of the pump and we are ready to add it into Adam's environment!

Left and middle pieces

Steven here, with my middle piece of the boiler pump. I've done a bit more to it, adding more parts as my guesswork alone is teaching me how the machine works, giving me a much clearer idea of how it should be coming together.



This is what it looked like last night, before I started adding more pieces, applying meshsmooth to one or two parts and changing the colours from something you'd see in Toytown to match the appearance of the actual machine:



It's looking much better now, but there are still a few more details I need to add before I start animating the swivels and pistons. Aside from what's lacking at this moment in time, I'm very pleased with how it looks so far.

Craig seems to have finished his left part of the machine, and I think he's done a pretty good job. He's also recoloured it to match the paint job that the boiler pump has, and this is the result:



I have to say that I'm quite impressed with the model as a whole, especially the amount of detail that he's put in.

Now, it's time to bring these two parts together to create two thirds of the boiler pump! So with mine and Craig's modelling powers combined, we have...



...discovered that our models are completely out of scale with each other. We have both been using centimetres as our measuring unit in 3DS Max, but my part is stupidly oversized, whereas Craig has been working with the correct scale of the real life boiler pump. So, it's now time to shrink my piece down to the right size and bring the two together...



Although there are a few minor niggles like overlapping pieces and some colours not quite matching, it's starting to come together quite nicely. Keep a look out for my next entry as I apply finishing touches to my middle piece, and start adding some realistic materials to our models.

Ryan Jackson 0705370

My task in the group is to create elements of the environment. My aim to create water (or some other liquid) that will be held in a container as if it were to be fed through the pump. And fire, which of course provides the steam to power the pump itself. I will also be modelling parts of the main pump itself, to which we are referring to as the 'right' side of the pump.

At the moment I am concentrating on the fire effect. Here is a video of how it looks so far with a rough idea for the house of the fire.



One particular issue with the fire at the moment is when a light source is added in the environment. It seems to be changing the colour of my flames to blue for some reason - this is not the case in the video above as there is not any lighting in the surrounding area.

More to come soon!

Craig Barker 0607747

Here I have added the final bits to my side of the boiler pump. I have added the the little taps at the bottom and created a quick render of my model so far using mental ray, which I was unfamiliar with at the start of the module, but with some online guidance, I created my first video clip!

Steven Reeves 0701858

For this group project, my own task involves modelling and animating this particular section of Arthur Mumford's pump, circled in the photo below:

This part features swivels which are seemingly attached to clamps that move a pair of pistons back and forth. And by "seemingly", I mean that I can't clearly tell whether or not they are actually attached just by looking at the photos (I was never able to visit the museum myself, so a lot of guess work has to be done by me). Presumably, the swivels on the sides actually push the clamps attached to the pistons back and forth without actually being attached to them:



Look where the arrow is pointing. The swivel doesn't appear to actually be attached to the clamp, and the part where the arrow points to appears to have had a load of paint scratched off over time. So at the moment, this is the only lead I've got as to how this part works.

Here's what I've modelled so far:



I started out by modelling the main body of this section (the part in gold), which I did by making a box, adjusting the size and number of faces as I needed, and extruding the faces in order to match the proportions of the actual machine. From there I added more shapes for the various parts of the machine, with a bit more work going into the swivels and the clamp holding the pistons.

I will use modifiers to smooth it all out when I feel the time is right, but I want to complete the modelling process fist. There is still one little bit that I'm currently stuck on...



These two joints. And I have no idea how the work or how they move, so it seems that there's plenty of guess work for me to do.

Craig Barker 0607747

I was allocated the tasks of collecting all needed information on the boiler pump, along with creating the small end of the pump where the steam exits.

I started off by making the indented top of the pump complete with the four nuts and bolts.
In order to make the indented top, I had to select the required amount of faces from the editable poly modifier and use extrude to pull them down a small amount. However, I noticed from the reference images that the four corners of the indented top were rounded and not square, to make them rounded I selected the edge modifier from within editable poly, selected the inside edge, and pulled it in slightly. I did this for the remaining three and then added a turbosmooth to make the edges nice and smooth!



















I then continued modelling the rest of the pump. Below are a few pictures of the pump so far. Once the modelling is complete, I will add textures to it to make it more realistic.