Virtual Environments Group Work- From the Start

For the group project, I was with Dan; Teresa and Kevin. The brief was to simulate in 3D an artifact from the Langdon Museum of Power to show where the machine would have been used and what it was for.

After a visit to the museum to take reference photos and videos of various machines to give us a basic idea of what they looked like and how they worked, we met as group to choose an engine. The minutes from the first group meeting, by Kevin, are below:

Minutes from meeting
- We arranged a group meeting for Monday October 5th at 10 AM
- All group members attended this meeting
- We discussed what we believe would be the best way to approach the task in hand
- We discussed what pictures we liked from the collection that we had taken
- We discussed what we could do for each picture that we liked and then narrowed it down working out whether it would be too much work, too little work, or just not within our knowledge of 3dsMax
- We also discussed how best to share work among each other, decision to use Dropbox was made
- Another visit to the museum was discussed, and the time allowing we will hopefully revisit
- The machine that we decided we would most likely be modelling is the "reliable steam engine"

To summarise, we chose the Joseph Evans Reliable Steam Pump, which was placed near collieries and was designed to pump tar from storage tanks to road or rail vehicles for transport.



Our initial visit to the museum had produced many helpful images and videos of the engine. However, Teresa's extra research such as revisiting the museum to obtain more detailed images; corresponding with people who worked with the machines and obtaining designs of the location the engine was used in was invaluable.