3d Watch Mechanism D&D Plot Device.

[Redrobes]

Really Awesome. The only thing I don't like is that you might lose your current avatar which I think is really cool !

[someguy]

Very cool! That molten rock is the best I could manage.

[Robbie]

Thanks! Yeah I may actually make this my new avatar when its done.

[RobA]

The problem could be a integer division issue. Some software will return an integer if two integers are divided. Try 21.0/13.0 in the formula to see if that makes a difference.

-Rob A>

[Robbie]

That was it!!! Nice find RobA!

[Redrobes]

I was looking at your animated gif and its great but it might just look a touch easier on the eye if it had some inter frame motion blur. For me its looking like its lit with a strobe.

Another thing I am just merely curious about. The big wheel has those pins on the outside at irregular spacing. What do they do in a real clock ?

[Robbie]

Yeah that animation was just to show the actual motion of the balance wheel and escapement...the final animation will be much more cinematic with specular bloom, lighting, and blur.

The pins are balance weights. They are irregularly spaced, but evenly spaced if you look at it in relation to the balance arm.

In a real watch/clock...the center wheel (which is the last big gear in the chain) is attached to the mainspring barrel (the spring that gets wound) which powers all the other gears in the train all the way to the escape wheel. The escape wheel basically pushes on the escape lever just enough to make the balance wheel keep its movement. The pins are adjustable by the watchmaker to account for slight imperfections in the manufacturing of the balance wheel...it has to be absolutely perfect, because a half a click (tick or a tock) inaccuracy out of every 1000 clicks could mean an inaccuracy of a couple of HOURS a day.

Do a search on youtube for balance wheel to see an example of the movement.

here's the standard geartrain on a clock.

[Robbie]

I've decided to move th egear train out and make it longer, and go more for a "key" shape since it will technically be a key. I restarted the housing (right now just a disk at the balance wheel end) and added motion blur. Here you can see the balance wheel and the escape wheel slightly blurred because of its motion.

I have 600 frames of animation setup...thats 20 seconds of animation or ten full swings of the balance wheel. ALL the gears in the gear train are properly wired. and they work like a charm. Now I just gotta start building the housing and the method with which it will connect to the Orrery, and then render a movie.

Problem with rendering amovie is I'm currently at 1 minute per frame rendering time...thats 10 hours of rendering, give or take a few hours. Most of that time is due to the Motion Blur calculation. I tried rapid motion blur, but it crashes Max. Rapid motion blur would bring my full 600 frames render time down to 2 hours.

Here's a pic of it thus far though.

[RPMiller]

Your players better buy the beverages for your next game session considering the amount of work you've put into this "prop". LOL

That is going to be very cool to see in action.

[Robbie]

well...I found a workaround for the motion blur crash...I can still do motion blur and my renders at 320x240px are around 11 seconds.

Will post an .avi in about 2 hours or so.