Week 3 - Creating Main Components
Hello Readers,
As you can see from the images, the design has a lot of complex curved surfaces, which would be incredibly difficult to accurately reproduce using the projection method I wrote about in my first blog post. A 3D printer would be able to produce these fluid surfaces much more easily and accurately than I could make by hand with foamboard
Besides the hull, I've also gotten to designing some of the ship's armament. I've done this in the game From The Depths that I mentioned in my introduction post, as it's easier to design aesthetically pleasing shapes and contains ready-made gun parts. I will be able to 3D print my From The Depths creations because the game contains an "export to .STL" function, which exports the 3D model of the design to a printable file.
Now that the core components of the ship are in place, It's time to start thinking about the packaging and how everything will fit together in the limited deck space a ship has. Of course, this can't be completely figured out until the secondary armaments and anti-air batteries have been designed, but because I have the main guns worked out, I can start some rudimentary designs that I can construct the rest of the bridge and superstructure around. Also, I'll hopefully be able to begin actual construction next week, once I get more filament for my 3D printer.
I've made some significant progress in constructing the ship, and I'd like to share with you what I've come up with. First and foremost, I've completed a design for the ship's hull, and I'm ready to begin fabricating it. Slightly differing from my initial plan, I've decided to 3D print the hull in order to make a more complex shape.
As you can see from the images, the design has a lot of complex curved surfaces, which would be incredibly difficult to accurately reproduce using the projection method I wrote about in my first blog post. A 3D printer would be able to produce these fluid surfaces much more easily and accurately than I could make by hand with foamboard
One crucial obstacle, however, is that the ship is scaled 1:360, meaning that the model would be 1 meter long, but my printer has a build volume of 220x220x250, making the hull too big to print in one piece. Luckily, the 250mm maximum height restriction is the perfect height to split the 1m-long model into 4, 250mm long pieces and print them standing on end.
Now that the core components of the ship are in place, It's time to start thinking about the packaging and how everything will fit together in the limited deck space a ship has. Of course, this can't be completely figured out until the secondary armaments and anti-air batteries have been designed, but because I have the main guns worked out, I can start some rudimentary designs that I can construct the rest of the bridge and superstructure around. Also, I'll hopefully be able to begin actual construction next week, once I get more filament for my 3D printer.
Comments
Post a Comment