Mechanical Horse Leg Front
Concept:
Anthropomorphism is, by all means, my most favorite form of art. It's one of the oldest variations of sculptural form discovered. Egypt was where it began for me. Their culture was by far the most anthropomorphic cultures in history, they have a god/goddess for everything, and many are half-man-half-animal.
In my brainstorming phase, I remembered seeing an elephant that received a prosthetic foot. Think about it, that prosthesis has had to have been a super strong material to withstand the weight of an elephant. But as I always try to make everything 50x harder than it has to be, I thought of my friend and his love for horses. I wanted to design a mechanical horse leg prosthetic. It started out as just a regular horse prosthetic but thought about the complexity of horse movement. Horses require a very complex anatomy to be able to run as fast as they do, so why not make a prosthesis that can also withstand the weight and complexity of a horse stride? I used Andrew Chase - Mechanical Horse for the project.
I'm not an expert in mechanics but I did spend a lot of time, about 4 years, learning the mechanical make up of a weapon while I was on board a navy ship. The Gyroscope (not actual mechanism, but similar) and the wobble gear (not actual mechanism, but similar) were one of the most complex mechanical mechanisms that I did maintenance on. I really didn't enjoy the maintenance but I did love the complexity of the mechanics.
Also thanks to the excellent Ted talk by Aimee Mullins for giving me the idea. I very much enjoyed seeing her anthropomorphic body morph where she portrayed a Cheetah with actual Cheetah hind legs as prosthetics. She can be seen in "Cremaster 3," (2002) a film by © Matthew Barney.
Ghosted Black
Organization Colored
Modeling Techniques:
About 80% of my design is copied from Andrew Chase's design, but I didn't make everything as crude as his design. He made it look like actual welded pieces of sheet metal. I really liked the natural angles of a horse and morphed the angles of the knee and the hoof to match a horse's actual resting position. So what I did was look up Horse anatomy by Herman Dittrich and drew some photos that resembled muscular anatomy. I mostly just traced his designs so I could get correct angles.
Anatomical referenced leg
The image above was the leg I had based my mechanical drawing off of. I used curve interpolate points to create the outline of my reference image from both the front and right sides. I then manually bent the front curve to roughly get as center as possible from the right reference curve I created. I used F10 to get the control points for the curve. The reason I bent the front curve was so I could create inner circles to loft the shape. I used 103 curves to create the mesh for the form. I lofted all of those curves together, which I give great thanks to Professor Scott for the assistance, and that is the image you see above. The only difference is the green hoof is different. I used that hoof and adapted it for the mechanical parts. It's not entirely mechanical looking, but I think it looks better than the hoof in Andrew Chase's model. I was not getting the NetworkSRF to work, so loft did the same thing for me.
Keyshot - Left and Front angles with Reference Images
Keyshot - Right Angle
From here on out it was very easy for me, organic stuff just doesn't click well yet. I used MoveUVN coupled with Select U and Select V to smooth out all of my yucky curves. Something that saved me hours, unlike my stupid mouse. Thanks again Professor Scott for giving me this incredible tool. It's the most essential tool for this project.
Keyshot - Gear / Knee
I used pipe for the cylindrical sections of the shin and thigh. I created a cylinder for the knee gear, ankle, and a couple other locations on the top basket. The knee is the only gear with slots on the leg. I created the cylinder, a small box, and used array polar with 180 degrees to make the gear. I used the reference image to create a majority of the shapes with curves and then extruded them. The nub box on the top was purely impulsive. I wasn't sure how I was going to draw that in my references so I left it out to sculpt later. This was the hardest part for me to design because I wasn't sure what to do. I used boolean difference to create the spot where the nub of the leg will rest inside.
Keyshot - Nub Seat and Ball Bearing Gear
Materials:
I wanted to use a tough metal like Titanium or Steel, but their color spectrium wasn't working for me even when manipulating the attributes. I really liked Zinc's attributes because it had more than one color slot. Then I used the pearlescent metals because they have the flakes. I really like seeing pearlescent paint on cars.
Color inspiration, I used zinc and recolored it to more resemble the fire-bronzed metal on the image, I used colored metallic paint similar to the fingers. And I wanted to add a little touch of color so I used another colored metallic paint and used one of the browns for the nub seat. I changed the color of the flakes to make the overall color brighter and somewhat match the orange sheen similar to the other metallic paint I used..
Keyshot - Hoof and Ankle Detail
