Ferris Wheel

Ferris wheel next. I approached this by breaking the design down to single sections, where they could be simply be duplicated throughout the model to form the ferris wheel as a whole. It took a little trial and error but things eventually fell into place.



I've also initially laid out the UVs, where hopefully they are ready for texturing.






One issue that occurred was in rotating the ferris wheel once everything had been modelled. Despite grouping and centring pivot point of the main wheel, when the wheel was rotated the carts would not rotate correctly resulting in a peculiar effect. Here I have provided a quick video to help illustrate the problem.



Although not entirely necessary to fix the problem as our scenes will not be animated, it would cause problems if I ever wanted to adjust the positioning of the wheel or carts, especially in portraying a more natural and less constructed position as it stands now. Thus, after some thought, I eventually found that the pivot points of the carts needed to be further adjusted to sit at the top of the axis where their are joined to the main wheel, and that as the wheel rotates, the carts must rotate the opposite way to retain their position. Some surfing on the net revealed that a simple expression could be created in the expression editor to do this:

cart_Grp01.rotateZ = -(rotateMarker.rotateZ);

With this, I can rotate a marker created by a distance measuring tool to turn the wheel one way, and the carts would mirror this action the opposite way, effectively solving the problem.



I'm pretty pleased with how the model turned out, and solving the issue of turning the wheel makes it all the more sweeter.

Thoughts and feedback welcome.