Moar M103 madness

Again the beauty of playing with 3D arts is the fact that I can do this sort of thing in bite sized chunks WHENEVER time would allow me to, and that means that I can focus on DETAILS better when I DO NOT feel pressured to hurry the fuck up and just get it over with.

That said, here's a bit of 3D tank imagery that I'm working on. This is my tank.. well hubby's tank.. mine would be a Patton-48... anyhow our tank the M103 continually being updated and refined, and when you compare my latest dabbling against some credible and reliable reference images, you could see why I'm feeling rather pleased with this.

Admittedly there was little wrong with Max's tank to begin with, but thanks to my newly acquired eye for details, something all visual artists will acquire over time, my satisfaction over my work quickly dulled when it became very obvious that no matter how much I tried to match the cog wheels at the rear with the individual teeth (end caps) on the tracks, that they would not fit together unless squished or stretched unrealistically so...

Turns out two things were working against me with that regard. One... I had given each drive sprocket an incorrect number of teeth on each flange.. 13 each to be precise... and Secondly... I had no credible information regarding the size of each track link in my sets, so I fudged them, and relied upon scaling to squish and stretch them into what looked accurate enough to fit... but as we can see in the upper right of this image, the teeth would bite each other, or as more professional 3D artists would say.. "Object clipping" with each other... which is why my physics engine in sketchup would grumble whenever I'd try to make the tank drive around as expected. The tracks would skip and sometimes even throw off the tank (track throwing) something which in real life would be deadly.... tanks that can't move are just sitting ducks!

So over time I kept working at the problem of accuracy and low and behold, upon getting my paws on credible info, I find that yep, my work was incorrect all along, so rather than trying to salvage things(an impossible task) I sucked it up, put on my big girl panties, and made a new set of gears and tracks from scratch that matched as closely as possible to actual measurements.

Hey huzzah the teeth actually meshed for once and did not clip each other! Wonderful!

or so I thought.. 

After making blueprint accurate tracks... now my wheels were mismatched! xP

So new wheels were in order, and they too also look exactly like my references!

Anyhow why so much effort for something that didn't look all that bad to begin with, you may ask?

Well this is to help put me in my holiday mood!

You see I have plans on resuming.... if time will allow me... my Halloween and cosplay art for this year, and I wanted to cosplay as something Girls und Panzer so yeah... can't have some accurate GuP cosplay of myself and friends if my tanks and things don't look right... right?! D

So then here's my recent dabbling in art. A bit of tanks and things for the giggles.

Enjoy!

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M103 = Chrysler Motors and Detroit Arsenal
3D renderings by moi
Made with SketchUp