Giant Crossbow Final Design

For this post I am going to comment on my first final design which is Leonardo Da Vinci's Giant Crossbow. Now for this I firstly wanted to create the basic outline of the shape, which was achieved by using basic standard primative shapes (such as boxes, cylinders, planes and cones). So I started with the body which where all boxes, which needed to be thin then some needed to be rotated because the crossbow is at an angle, which didn't prove too difficult. Once the body was created (I had foundations to work on) I then decided to create the wheels that go around the edge, which I first thought was going to be simple, but I was so wrong. I created the first wheel using a cylinder and making sure that it had enough equal sides for me to delete the faces so it looked more like a wheel, however there where gaps inside the wheel so I needed to use the 'create' tool to create more faces. Once I done one wheel I copied the other wheel as 'instances' so that there were three on each side. Next I done the support for the wheels which was a simple box just 'extruded' outwards around the edge, the other side was just an instance of the first. Then came the arrow which wasn't too difficult, it was just a cylinder with the vertices at the back pulled inwards to make a sort of flight like on arrows, then it needed to be rotated to fit the body, then the cone was just simply put on the arrow. For the turning wheel I used a wheel I had already created to make a copy, I then 'beveled' out some of the sides to make sort of pointy bits to show a turning wheel. The rope was just a cylinder with a 'bend' modifier used, I had to make sure the pivot point was in the middle of the object and bent the object round to make rope for the arrow. Next was the crossbow tip which again was a box 'extruded' out and then bent with the 'bend' modifier which by this point the crossbow was coming together and looked very realistic, just one final touch was needed before materials where added. This was the hole that runs through the middle of the body, which was created using a very long but very thing box and changing the vertices slightly, from there I had to use the 'Pro Boolean' tool to cut the shape I created into the body, from there I made small mechanisms to fit in the hole to complete the crossbow.


Once I was happy with what I had created I needed to add materials to the object to make it complete. For this I used different textures that I found on online resources and used these as images in my material editor. From there I used some textures as I found them, other's I used the 'bump' tool to add more detail, and for other's I needed to use the UVW Mapping modifier, because some textures were a bit fuzzy but they all came out clear in the end with some fine tuning. Lastly to fit the mood I created a plane for the crossbow to sit on which was a simple brick work texture.

This is a screenshot of the crossbow's final design with materials added.

This is a screenshot example of some of the materials used on the Giant Crossbow.

And here is the final render of the Giant Crossbow I Have created. (Leonardo Eat Your Heart Out!)