For this project I wanted to create something that I figured nobody else would create. I decided that since my home town was Cardston I would create something from down there. I got the idea to look inside the Remington Carriage Museum and see if there was anything in there that would be fun to build. I ended up finding this old fashioned sharpening wheel and decided that I would try to build it because it was interesting but still simple enough that I figured I could build it.
I used Blender to create my images. I chose Blender because a while back I saw it on the internet and downloaded it but I never actually used it and I figured this was a good excuse to finally sit down and learn how to use it.
When I first started I decided to see if I could figure out Blender by myself. After working on that for a little while I gave up completely and found some online tutorials. After a couple of these I decided to try again, and again I ended up having to go back to tutorials. Eventually though I learned enough that I was able to work my way through it.
I tried to go into a lot of detail like in the screws where I actually put all the grooves of the screw in but I ended up running out of time before I was able to get it as good as I would have liked it.
For the texturing of the the various materials I ended up using small samples from the original pictures. Even though they were taken from the original image I still had to do a little texture modification in Blender to make them look more like the picture. It was a little tricky to get the textures looking good, but I found that the lighting was by far the hardest part. I never expected it to be quite so challenging so I didn't look up any tutorials on it initially. Then when it came time to work on it and I was spending so much time on it I realized that I probably should have done a tutorial or two before diving head first into lighting.
If I was to do this again one of the things I would do different is I would have made sure to take more lighting and texture tutorials. I would have given myself more time to work on it so I could put in all the fine details that I had to leave out. I really don't like how I made the grinding stone because I made it using a Boolean operation. I took a hollow cylinder with a very thin edge then I used the Boolean operation to delete from the grinding stone any part that overlapped my hollow cylinder. I don't know if this is a problem just in Blender or other ray tracing software as well but when one does this it can cause some bad things to happen. If I was to do it again I would put the grooves in the wheel the same way I did it in the screw by repeatedly extruding out making the cylinder narrower using the new vertices created by that extrusion then extruding out and making it wider with the vertices created by the second extrusion. Another thing I would do differently is I would take more straight on pictures of the object because all the different angels confused me a little when I was trying to match the ratios in size between one part of the object and it's other parts.
My favorite part would probably be the axis that runs through the center of the wheel.I put a lot of time into it and I was able to put in almost all the detail I wanted there.
