BillyJack | 13 years ago | 3 comments | 5 likes | 4.2K views

Yousef, LostBoyz, sinus300 and 2 others like this!

If you've seen any of my uploads, you should be able to tell I'm not much on artestry, but lean much more toward mechanics and making things work correctly. Well this is another one of those.



First, we're working with both reciprocating and rotary motion, to simplify the use of both, I created two seperate containers for them. One for spinning gears and the other for straight line. (I set everything to "0" position on depth and extend the camera arm length to change view perspective)



The straight line (or DragBar) container holds only the DragBar.EPS file. Once sized, they are duplicated and moved to touch end to end for as long as you want the bar to be. Then I used the container position to make it move back and forth.



The other container is for the rotary gears. In this container, there are 4 sets of male gears and three sets of female gears, all interlocked and meshing perfectly. (The gear spokes are here too but a seperate issue and I'll get to that in a minute) Each GearSet has an "X" number. That number is a percentage value. For example:
If you mate an X025 to an X100, the X025 is 1/4th the size of X100. To adjust the initial size, use FONT SIZE to set the ratio. If X100's FONT SIZE is 1, then X025 FONT SIZE will be 0.25. Using FONT SIZE instead of text size here is important cause FONT SIZE adjust all 3 axis equally. After the ratio is set, you can use the "text size" to adjust the thickness of the gear.
Same ratio applies to rotation as well. X025 being 1/4th the size of X100 means X025 has to turn 4 times for every turn of the X100.
***(X100 @ 360 degrees turns X025, 1440 degrees (360 X 4 = 1440)***

That's the basic math, now for the "Extras". Instead of moving all the media files into their perspective folders, I added a folder to the zip file called "EXTRAS". This folder contains the gear hubs. I built the gears as rings and wanted to be able to have a multiple of different hub options. If you look in the folder, you'll find 9 differents spoke eps files. The number represents how many spokes each hub has. For example I mated the X200 to a 7 spoke hub. To do this, I just duplicated the the X200 layer and changed the eps file to Spoke07, then resized it using FONT SIZE to fit inside the gear ring. Also You'll notice, there are a couple of CirSaw files in the "Extras" folder. These mate up to only the X025 GearSet. I wanted to create a way of adding attachments to the GearSet and this worked. To use them, duplicate an X025 GearSet and then change eps file to CirSaw01 for explample. Resize the CircSaw to fit the splines using FONT SIZE and you know have a circular saw blade attachment for your project. Fiinally, I've added a "025GearMate" BMP file to the extras folder. This is a core file for those of you into making your own eps files. The splines match up to the X025 GearSet so you can design your own attachments by filling in the space around this core.

Hope this all made sense, but feel free to ask questions if any of it is unclear.

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