Megan Bednarz

Click To Play
If ONLY I could have gotten the track to work. I have one piece of the band moving around here. I left it a bright color because I thought it looked cooler. I tried to put it in an array and change the variable it uses to translate based on the array index, but it had strange errors and I couldn’t figure it out. I will next try to have just a few pieces of track and try it on those. If I can get those to work, obviously the rest of the array would be a piece of cake. Lesson to me: iterative coding. I always try and do too many things at once.

Two lines of code and 6 frames produced this…

For some reason, the center hex bolts are rotating the wrong way… I may have to boolean those gears and then turn them. I used booleans and polygons for this. Not exactly good modeling practice, but for gears… it gets the job done. They’re full of planar faces, so it shouldn’t matter TOO much how many sides each of those faces have. FYI I have divided them up pretty well at least.

My concept for this project is to do a bunch of gears, different types of gears, all connected, and have a band going around them which has the gear notches also. The band is going to be the major programming feat, so I will work on it next, then worry about other gears. I’m probably going to have it divided into segments that march along (like a real marching band!) based on proximity to another object and then turn… for instance, when they come tangent to a gear, they should stay tangent to a gear and go around. We’ll see how I can tackle the daunting task of programming that…using expressions!