Mmmm baked goodies!

Early attempt at baking some ambient occlusion onto the nose gear strut;

(click for high res versions)

Blog alterations

I've been messing with the blog in an attempt to get a comments form working. In doing so i have changed the template, but not the content. The comments form is still not appearing for me, and i have no idea why!

For now, if anyone want's to contact me please use Tonka005[at]gmail.com, and if anyone knows how to have a working comments form on a blogger erm blog, please let me know!

Ok, now the comments are working, typical! It seems when you enable comments they are not automatically added to all post's, just new ones from the time the comments were enabled. I'll enable comments on the old post's now. Sorry for any confusion or annoyance!

Added a little more detail....

Another milestone has been achieved. Barring some further texture work, the Nose landing gear is complete.
It has taken many months, hundred's of hours, and a little bit of bad language, but i have carefully added as much detail as i can to really set this landing gear apart from most others. It is mechanically accurate, and contains a lot of animations for structure's large and small.

Click on the photo's to see them at a higher resolution.

As you can see in the pictures above, there is a massive amount of detail to be seen, all of it is accurate to my knowledge, and systems like the uplock unit and hydraulic ram for the aft doors are fully functional.

Many of the surfaces have been textured with ambient occlusion baked in. This gives ray-traced shadows and shading, which really adds to the look of the model and enhances the detail.

I'm also working on a method to make the tyres squash at the bottom with varying pressure from above. More on this later if i can make it work well.

That's all for now, hopefully the next update won't take as long. If anyone has any questions or comments, please e-mail me or use the comments form.

Thanks for looking.