The world on a cog

[Robbie]

Here's the Earth Cog early displacement map. I'm going to have to manually displace it instead of using a dynamic render-time displacement, because without manual I can't specify the sea-level value. I've also not spent much time on mapping the texture, as you can tell it doesn't wrap around the gear teeth at all now. But the heightmap looks pretty cool.

Masden, if you could give me some insight as to how the sun works, and maybe how many teeth that greater outer wheel outside of the elemental gears have (or a gear ratio amount) that would be helpful

[torstan]

I certainly didn't plan on a large outer cog so I didn't ratio it appropriately, so no help from me. I'll think about it though.

I love the heightmapped version. I'd probably suggest using one of the darker textures for this cog as the fire one will be the lightest - and looks a little like desert which will be pretty close in colour to this. Also, the mountains can certainly be sharper.

This is great!

[Robbie]

Here's a visualization of what I'm talking about. I'm not sure what to do about it though. I'm not a gear mechanic lol.

Note how the top right and bottom left cogs are ok...but the top left and bottom right don't line up, and they're perfectly placed equidistant from the center and from each other.

The outer ring has 270 teeth in this model.

180 to 45 to 270

[torstan]

Ah, I see. Yes, the gearing will only work if the outer ring has either 180 or 360 teeth. But then of course the number of teeth will be out, so their width will be out. I guess the teeth of the smaller cogs could be more angled so that there's a little more flexibility in the size and spacing of teeth they mesh with. Failing that (which I think will probably fail) I'd have the cogs have two levels. One on the top for meshing with the internal cog. One on the bottom to mesh with the external cog. Does that make sense?

[Ascension]

Does the outer cog really need all of the teeth to fit in every tooth of the smaller cog? Couldn't it have some sort of displacement so that the outer cog teeth hit like every other or every third tooth of the smaller cog?

[RobA]

Does the outer cog really need all of the teeth to fit in every tooth of the smaller cog? Couldn't it have some sort of displacement so that the outer cog teeth hit like every other or every third tooth of the smaller cog?

...the engineer in me shudders....

-Rob A>

[Masden]

here's a jpg of the full mechanism, without the celestial ribbon

I can't do a good elevation map -not my strong point. :-/ so no uvw map or materials on the gears yet.