Museum of Power - 2 stroke engine

The second assignment is the group project.
Our job was to choose one of the engines from the Museum of Power and design a nice animation/presentation for it.
We decided to animate 2 stroke engine.


In the very first group meeting we discussed modelling and ideas for the final animation. This was really helpful to each of us because we knew what must be done, what would be animated and so on. So we could organise our work. We also decided to make group notes every week. As it turned out I noticed that both Mike and me have the latest 3ds Max version whereas Shou has 3ds Max 9 and Kiel - 3ds max 8. So we decided we would do all the animation in university Max version (3ds Max 9). Mike and me will save all the models without any textures of 3ds format, so that we could export these files into older versions of 3ds Max.

Modelling
At the beginning of the project I proposed to my team members that it would be better if each of us was responsible for particular part of the engine. Just before we started modelling we had set up the scale for the pictures. The reason was to keep the original aspect ratio. We could always scale our parts the way they fitted each other.

So when we set up the scale and assigned job to everyone, I started my modelling. I was responsible for the lower part of the engine and the flywheel. At the beginning it seemed to be easy to do but it wasn’t. The pictures that Mike had prepared, were not good enough, unfortunately. The problem was I couldn’t see some of the details and sometimes it was a bit confusing how the particular part should look. I couldn’t find any similar model in the internet so I just tried to make this look as close to the picture as possible.
Anyway I started from flywheel

There was nothing difficult in this model. I wanted to keep this simple with few polygons.
For example to create those big circles? I have used ChamferCylinder (to have smooth edges). I turned the cylinder into ‘edit poly’, I copied the model, and by selecting some polygons I used ‘bridge’ option to connect these two models.

Everything else was done in a very similar way. The reason is I wanted to design a low poly model. Because I knew we would produce a ‘wire frame’ effect, I didn’t want to have any mess in the mesh. Besides, low poly models are easier to render..

More work took me the lower part of the engine. As before, I wanted to deliver a low poly model. The lower part of the engine has many details and it has a ‘difficult shape’. So I decided to spend more time on that model and make sure it is of low poly.

As you can see in the pictures this part is very ‘engeering’, with some smooth edges. It is quite difficult to do.
I started from drawing a shape by using spline tool. Then I extruded this shape by using ‘extrude’ modifier. Then I added some more polygons into the surface and again I extruded some polygons

Then I moved some edges to give the model closer look (refering to the pictures). To make the upper edge smooth, I selected that edge and then by using the ‘chamfer’ option from Edit Edges I set up Chamfer Amount and Segments to create smooth edge. Thanks to this technique I smoothed the area I wanted, with as few polygons as possible. I didn’t have to use mesh smooth or separate that part from the model..

Then I continued. I added more elements, I moved the edges around and so on. To create holes I used ‘Boolean’. I also added some ‘inside’ elements but as it turned out I didn’t have to and we removed them later.

The finall model has only 816 faces.