Re-inventing the Wheel

The best strategy for creating our model was to start by splitting up the tasks into areas.
The four main areas of the model are: The Environment to surround the machine, the main frame and components, the casing of the machine, and the wheel at the rear of the machine.
I was given the task of creating the wheel. This is a fair load smaller than the other parts of the model (excluding the environment), so an agreement with the group was that I would take a little more than everyone else in the animation part of the model.
To create the wheel, I started by creating a circle. At this stage, I felt that it would be best to create the wheel as a solid cylinder and then to use pro Boolean to removed the inner features, such as the centre and the ridge around the edge. Below is an image illustrating how I will separate my workload.

To create the ridge, I then created another cylinder which I then placed on top and using pro Boolean, I subtracted this smaller cylinder from the large one.

I then started work on creating the triangular shapes to punch through the central section of the cylinder in order to make the gaps present in the wheel. This initially caused problems as the sides on the triangular shaped wholes of the wheel are not all straight – one side curves to follow the shape of the wheel. This caused me a major setback, as I was unable to use any default tool within 3dsmax, and it took many attempts with the Bezier tool to create a curve which matched the outer edge of the circles curvature.
I then positioned the shape on top of the cylinder and arranged them into a position where there were six triangular shapes.

However, it was at this stage that i realised the shapes were not in exact positions, and that there was no clear way for me to be able to align these shapes to make the wheel accurate – So I had to return to the drawing board and look at an alternative method.

My solution was to remove the centre of the wheel completely, and then to create the spokes using a hexagon for the centre and then rectangles as the spokes to the edge of the wheel. I created the shapes using the splines tool, and then I extruded them to create the shapes centre.

This process completed the wheel, and I added a simple colour scheme to it, which will stay until we add a material to it.