The first several Models Of The Week (MOTW) will have an airport support equipment theme; this week's MOTW is a luggage conveyor.

Day 1: Spent the day finding reference photos and dimensions from the internet.

Update Day 2:  Rough modeled supporting assets (wheels, tires, etc.) and the vehicle itself.  I had vague memories of spinning curves to create objects.  That must have been a Maya memory, because Blender will only spin a mesh.

 

Update Day 3:  Textured and rigged almost the entire vehicle.  Figured out how to use custom properties and driven keys to allow the steering wheel to turn the four wheels.  Had some great learning experiences failing to rig the conveyor.  I found a great Blender Cookie tutorial that walked through rigging pistons with Blender's armatures.  My goal is to use that to right the conveyor, if I can finish in time.

• Linking to assets (in this case the tires) works well as long as everything is done locally.  Distributed rendering experienced a few Do-Overs because of the way I initially set up the files.
• I need to create a handful of 'sample human' figures to make the relative dimensions more believable (e.g., seat height, steering-wheel to seat distance, etc.)
• Rushing to texture before the model is complete is a waste of time.  This is a recurring theme for me.
• And, as always, you can find everything on YouTube!

The finished product is below.  Comments are always appreciated.  Cheers!