Finished the arm for naow :D  Next step....the body frame!

Finished the Thumb!

Worked on it a bit more...got the thumb where I want it to be for now.

Here you can download a 3D PDF of the piece...kinda cool.  Options to change to a wireframe etc. as well as rotate it.  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26765665/3dpdflowerarm.PDF (May work best to DL file but you can maybe enable the 3D in the browser.)

Added a bit more flair to the fingers :D but keeping it relatively basic till I go back for detailing it.

Lower Arm

Initially my goal is to start simple.  I am going to make a basic skeleton and position the parts in the car mode.  From there I will make the body pieces(i.e. doors, fenders yadda yadda) around the parts.  I wanted to start this way because then I will know what space I have to work with.  After the body pieces I will then go back to the skeleton and add all the detail(Armor and what not).

As of this moment, this is the lower arm assembly.  It consists of the lower arm, a wrist piece, palm piece, and 4 2 jointed fingers.  I will next add the thumb.  These pieces can be rotated and positioned as desired.  I may go back and change the fingers to 3 joints.

Remember, this is very basic skeleton, detail will be added later!

Numerical Methods

I was able to use the Wheel I made for a lab for my Numerical Methods Class.  The lab involved doing finite element analysis on an object.  A simple explanation is that the piece is broken down into tiny tiny pieces and those pieces are analyzed.  This was done in Practical Unigraphics NX7.5.  For my lab I started out with the basics, doing an analysis to see how the wheel would hold up to gravity(Setting the material for the piece to be ABS).  Ultimately I wanted to see how the rest of the weight of the body of the figure would affect the connecting pieces as well as the wheels.  Based upon the Analysis, the wheel should have no problem supporting the weight :D

Here are a few pictures from it.  If you want to check out my report let me know... I got a 95 on it :D

 While the bar looks like it deformed quite a bit, it was only displacing by 0.000173 mm!  A simple bar was used for this.

In order to solve this, there were over 500,000 Equations being solved at once!  There was minimal displacement due to gravity for the rigid body that simulates the rest of the figure.

Starting Piece!

Here is a shot of the wheel and tire for my custom transformer which I am doing in SolidWorks 2011.  This is going to be a car transformer that will be designed after a Supercar that has not previously been made a transformer!  If I told you what it is, don't spoil it for the others.  They will have to figure it out XD  The wheel was designed sometime last fall(busy with school)

Here is the same wheel printed on a fancy expensive 3D printer

I will keep updating with pictures as I go!