The past three days' worth of work have seen quite a bit of progress on this little project. That being said, given the glacial pace I've been working at (hours staring at my screen without the slightest clue how to proceed before finally doing something) and other activities, I fear that it may be another two days before this is finally done.
The gauntlets, tassets, and weapons are the only components left to make. There are plenty of additional details to add to existing components, such as rivet heads - rivet heads everywhere.
The first thing I did since first introducing this project, true to my prediction, was make the legs. Yesterday's work was on the shoulders, with lots of trial and error tweaking the means to hold the pauldrons and spaulders beneath them in place while also allowing for reasonable articulation. On actual armour, this would be achieved with two or three chain links, but I chose ball-and-socket joints for ease of assembly constraints. They are completely hidden on the assembly, but the individual component is a mess:
The boiler, meanwhile, I added earlier today while taking breaks from a welding project (making some new skids for my neighbour's snow-thrower, if anyone is curious). Despite the rivet heads, tubes, and doors, I think the boiler still needs additional details. What they will be, I'm not sure (this is coming from someone who has built functional boilers, by the way). Exposed gauges would be a nice steampunk touch (I even have some gauge mock-ups, complete with dial face decals, already in my component library), but there is no practical reason to leave gauges out in the open. I suppose a single gauge on the back to alert support personnel to imminent catastrophic failure might be advantageous, though.
I'm going to have to figure out how to run steam lines from the boiler to the weapons. Autodesk Inventor has tube and wire inputs at the assembly level, but much like the gear-maker, I've never had any luck getting it to work. Then again, even if I succeed this time round, animating the lines is going to be a chore on an entirely different level. Maybe I'll leave that problem for Blender.
The rest can be animated in Inventor, believe it or not. It won't look good, but experiments with such might prove valuable.
Still, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Despite its current appearance (and the title of this post), this armour is far from complete; it's just taking shape. I'll try to continue work on it tonight, but I'll probably just end up staring at the screen before going to bed.
