Thursday, July 21, 2011

Telehandler family tire creation

As I promised in the previous post, I would explain how to model the tires on the telehandlers.
Its very simple!

Tires and Tire Rims are the easiest family to build because they are circular.
Any circular family element should be built with the revolve command.

TIRE
    • draw tire profile as shown and draw a revolve line at where you want the center of the tire to occur.
    • Revolve the profile about the line.
    • Presto! 
    • Use this same process for the rim.
    • You should end up with a rim that looks like the 3d image below.
    • The treads in this family were built with arrays and every tread was physically modeled.
    • The tire treads on the pick truck family (to be shown at some later blog posting) were created out of curtain wall panels. If you use curtain wall panels, you don't have to model every tread.
RIM



2 comments:

J said...

Would it be better to revolve a solid, thicker tire, add no treads & array voids around it to make the treads? That way the solid geometry would be one piece... just wondering... -J

Marcello Sgambelluri said...

J,

You certainly could make the tire thicker ( the tire plus the thickness of the treads) then use an arrayed void to cut out the material between the treads as you suggested. It yields the same results. If this is the way you prefer to do it be my guest.
Would it be better? In my opinion...no. Because it has been my experience to avoid voids like the plague if it yields the same results as using solids. (why?) voids are less stable than solids...simple as that.
This may be a moot discussion IMHO anyway because from this day forth I recommend using curtain wall panels when modeling tire treads. Creating individual treads is less efficient from a time and file size perspective compared to using curtain wall panels.
I will explain how to do this in a later post.