Refining the Cockpit Housing Video

I've had a rough layout of the body for a while and now the fine-tuning has started.  The video is primarily of refining the cockpit housing.  The main difficulty was building an odd-ball primitive to build off of.  It was 16 sided but not all sides were the same length and I had to put in some odd loops to accommodate the scoops that go over the tentacles.  I wanted to box-model this piece so it would flow well from the tentacles, up and back to the main body.  Due to the odd shape, putting in edge loops was a challenge as well.

The further challenge will be cutting each body piece to fit with the other, then extruding those pieces so they have thickness otherwise they can't be printed) and figuring out a way that they will all fit together during the physical assembly of the printed model.

The mesh has to be really dense so it will print without showing any polygons.  This part is a good candidate for decimation which will reorganize and reduce the amount of polygons used.

Tentacle Mount Build Video

This is the building of the first tentacle mount. It's been revised but the basic design and methods remained the same.  I tried to speed this up and edit it down but have been having major problems with my screencast software.  A bunch of build videos were corrupted and this is one of the few that I salvaged.

The basic approach for this was to use a knuckle connected to the mount and build a hub that the tentacles would slot into.  Originally I planned on the tentacle having a pivot pin at the base so the whole thing could move but I realized that there wasn't much room underneath for the pins. I also realized that the tentacles are so flexible that the first knuckle could be stationary and there would still be plenty of room to move.  I put the knuckle/mount into an array so they could be positioned evenly.  The hub was then sized to fit the array and slots were booled out.  I had to used a slightly modified version of the mount for booling because the slot has to be bigger  than the original due to mechanical tolerances.