Cogs and gears
 

I am hopeing that this is going to be easy to solve. I am trying to make the insides of a watch with all it's cogs and gears. I made a poly cylinder and pulled the faces out and made the traditional cog (pic below). I now want to scale the spokes to make them more realistic, but I want to do them all at the same time. I tried selecting them all but I got some nasty results.

Thanks in advance for the help guys

_LIVID

Instead of moving the faces out like you did, you could go back and extrude them instead. Then you can simply adjust the attributes of the extrude and have them affect all of the individual spokes.

Sorry, I did extrude. Now I want to make the tips a bit thinner and refined ect.

_LIVID

I think what danny was meening.. was when you first extrue them. you are given the perportional modification tool to do it with..

I don't know if you can select all the faces now and use the perportional modification tool on them or not.. if it dosn't work thin I would try re-extruding them.

maybe you could undo what you have done already.. that is a cool idea btw.. makeing it how you did.. (least to me)

but start off agin and this time when you extrue the faces.. click on one of the boxes of the tool, when the yello scale box is on.. thin scale all the faces down some.. they will stay whare they are around the circle not get pulled in like you might think.. thin after you have the faces that will become the outside of the teath the size you want.. thin pull on the arows of the tool.. to pull all of the teath out.. in space whare they need to be..

yeah it seriously stinks that you can't always use the proportional modification tool and are forced to backtrack...

It's actually easy to adjust the extrude after you've deselected everything.

1) Select the mesh.
2) In your Channel box, under the Inputs section, select polyExtrudeFace1 (or whatever number it is).
3) Press "t" on your keyboard to bring up the Extrude manipulator.
4) Edit to your heart's content.

:D

huridly takeing notes on what danny said.

Hmmm, these are all good suggestions and I thank you for them. But I have a bad feeling that I am going to run into some major problems later on if I don't start correcty.

I was nieve in thinking that I could just make a ploy cylinder, squash it and pull out the teeth. There is more to it than I expected, I need to make the teeth smooth and rounded, I need to make holes in it (as you can see from the pic) ect.

If you guys know of a tutorial I will be most greatful (long shot I know)

_LIVID
:banghead:

There are a couple ways you could do it that I can think of offhand:

1). Create a NURBS circle with 50 sections. Select a cv, then select every other CV (select - skip - select - etc) until you have even selections around the whole circle. Uniformly scale the cvs out to create the cog shape. Lastly, run bevelPlus on it to create the cog geometry with the correct bevels, distance, etc. If you output your geometry to polygons when you bevelPlus, you can easily do booleans and whatever else you need on the inside of the cog.

2) Another way would be to create a poly cylinder, then create the trapezoidish tooth shape separately. Place it on top of the cylinder and scale it properly. Now, hit the insert key and move the tooth's pivot point to the middle of the cylinder. Hit "insert" again to get out of the edit pivot mode. Now just open up your duplicate options box, figure out the math of 360 divided by how many teeth you want....that's your # of duplications. Make sure it's set to duplicate along the proper axis, and duplicate. Now just boolean>union one piece at a time until you have all the teeth and the cylinder as one piece of geometry. Edit what you need from there.

I did this in about 1 hr. It is made from nurbs curves that have been extruded or had planar surfaces created from them. All surfaces are nurbs.

Everything has been circular filleted and trimmed to get the final shape.

To make the outside teeth I created a circle with 4 x the number of teeth. One tooth is made of 4 points in the circle. I selected 2 points, missed 2 points etc all the way around the circle and then scaled them out as required.

This gave a basic tooth shape with nice smooth curves. I rebuilt the curve using the 1 linear setting which gave nice sharp corners.

Hope this helps.........

oops......... wrong picture posted above. This one more clearly shows the teeth

Ah, that's right. It's every two points not every point in creating the teeth, as I mentioned earlier. Nice work, BG!

:bgreen:
Yay, well NitroLiq I followed your advice and made the cog below. I will make it again with more next time but this is just a test. I now want it to look a bit more ... well a bit more like baldgeek's (to be honest).

I also wasn't too hot on maths at school so if some one could gimmie a like or somthing to explain about Booleans then that would be cool.

_LIVID

ok this is very strange .... I expermented with Boolean (I love it!) and managed to make it look more like baldgeeks but when I made a mistake a went back to load it again the cog was gone. Sometimes a cone would be in it's place.

Even if I save the file in a different location the cogs would be gone. This is very fustrating.

Has anyone come accros this before?

_LIVID

P.S. I though I would post the most recient file. There should be three poles with cogs on them but all I can now see are the three poles and no cogs.

P.P.S. Also look inside the poles, you can see a cone in each one them?!

_LIVID