3D Week 03 - Lego Brick

For this week and next week's assignment, we are, as a class, recreating the siege of Helm's Deep from Two Towers. We were split into four teams: nature, man-made, character, and vehicle. I am heading up the vehicle team, and alongside Joe Bonura I am creating an Uruk-Hai ballista. My unique brick to help accomplish this we called the "engine block", though in the model it is the base for the ballista's firing mechanism. To start, I created the base of the model. The base is the same scale as a 2x4 plate, with 3 stud-sized holes in the middle. The flairs are each the length and width of a 1x4 plate, but half the height. They also cave in, and their studs are hollow.

To make these hollow studs, I simply took a cylinder, extruded a portion of the top downwards to make the hollowing, and slanted the bottom so that it neither poked through the top nor bottom of the base.

For the regular studs, I used Nick's video tutorials and manipulated a beveled cylinder to get the curve in at the top and curve out at the bottom which ends in normals pointed upwards like the base to create the illusion of a single piece.

All of these put together give me a rather good looking replication of the "engine block" brick.

And put inside Unreal:

I am excited to see where the project ends up, but I am not hyped for the several other unique blocks I would need to create to follow the instructions 1:1.