Crawler: Day Eight

I rendered this shot with a hard white light so you can see more of the smaller details. Currently this mesh is just shy of 200,000 Polys and will most likely be closer to 250,000 by the time its close to being completed. As you can tell, I finally cut into the mesh for the control/boom arm. The back blast shield is complete. All of the hydraulic lines are in place on the top and side sections of the crawler. All three sides are complete with exception to the rear. I will look at adding in some more details to the rear section as it looks to basic / plain compared to the rest of the model. I revisited the glass canopy and gave it some more shape and smoothing on its edges to help give it more of a curve.

Next few phases is going to be meshing out the control/boom arm and then tackling the launching arm that goes on the turreted like mount. For the control/boom arm, I will be creating two different models for it. One that sits recessed into the crawlers hull and the other that is extended upwards. I will design a socket like area to allow you to interchange these control/boom arms out as you see fit. I know the basket to this arm is not going to be dead on with the look of the actual design. Due to needing a .07mm wall thickness for Shapeways. I'll see what I can come up with thou, that is a close representation of it thou. The launching arm is going to be tricky. There is a lot of detail put into this section. Plus I need to design some functionality into it as well. I want the space booster to connect into the launching arm so a player can detach the space booster from the crawler. Yet make sure it is not a loose connection. This might be tricky since shapeways printing can be off +/1 .01mm.

After these two area's are done. I need to finish my work on the Space Booster.