Mark Miller's Mercedes 180 hp Engine Profiles

Mercedes 180 hp Plan View

I'm finally done with the engine - well as done as I can be with the reference I've got. There still are a couple of areas that could use better definition; That stuff on top of the carburetor, the water and oil pump and the linkages to the magnetos. I guess it's time to get the data file. The lower crankcase housing was definitely the most complicated modeling task on the engine and I'm still not very happy with it. Castings like this can be a nightmare to model because of all the compound curves. When using CAD software anything that can be extruded or turned (lathe tool) or made up of flat planes is easily generated, anything organic (or aerodynamic) is quite a bit more difficult. Oh well, time to move on.

These images haven't been tweaked, and if you look closely you can see some of the deficiencies of this particular rendering program. One of the worst problems is the way the shadows end before they reach their source (look at the shadows cast by the stiffening ribs on the engine mounts - which btw are wrong themselves - they should slope inwards). I'll go back in and rework the images in PhotoShop when I have some time. The image mercbrad.jpg uses a different rendering method called Radiosity, I?m not sure what that means but you can see it fixes that shadow problem and seems to be adding reflectivity, takes about 10x longer to render than normal Phong shading.

I went a little nuts with mapping this time, all the texture and bump maps were found on the web, I'm sure you could get better results if you custom made some maps. A visit to the junkyard with the digital camera might be productive. I also need some better plywood maps. The image mercrust.jpeg is a little too much for my tastes but you can see what?s possible. The image mercsterio.jpg is obviously a 3-d image - you need to wear 3-d glasses to see it - kinda silly but fun. Next up- Bulkheads and longerons

If anyone has any comments, corrections or criticisms please feel free to contact me at; Mark Miller, albatros1212@altavista.com.

Mercedes Clean Profiles

Mercedes Used Profile

Mercedes Stereoscopic Profiles

Mercedes AVI

Mercedes AVI Animation

Fitted Engine

This image I rendered out over the thanksgiving holiday - it took about 36 hours for my PC at work (Pentium2 400 mhz with 512 meg Ram) to process. The file size is about 19 meg (uncompressed tiff) and measures 3500x1900 pixels. The image here is obviously drasticaly reduced in size but I've included the detail so you could see what the original looks like. This is the first image I've rendered out in full ray trace mode and I must say - I'm pretty happy with it.

References:

Scale Aircraft Drawings, Volume 1 - WW1, Air Age Inc. - Drawings by William Wylam
Albatros D.Va German fighter of World War 1, Smithsonian Institute ress - Drawings by Bob Waugh
WW1 Aero No 128, May 1990
Photos by Ernest Thomas- the inspection plate on the upper crankcase housing was stolen directly from one of Ernest's photos- cropped, skewed, filtered (to get rid of all that jpeg noise) and mapped in place.