Opening the viewer found in ten seconds what the contact sheet had hidden
through two rounds of refinement: the bellows was cantilevered off a single
post driven through its middle, with four fifths of a door-sized leather bag
hanging in open air. The 300px thumbnail is too small to see what is under a
thing. A viewport you can orbit is not.
The support check passed it, and was right to by its own lights. The post
reaches the floor and the nose touches the hearth wall, so the assembly IS
connected to the ground. Connected is not the same as looking like it could
hold itself up, and looking like it can is the entire rule. The check
answers a question about topology; the rule is about weight.
So the bellows gets the bench it always had in life: two bearers let into the
forge wall at one end -- let INTO, a third of the way through, because a
bearer that stops at the wall face is a bearer resting on nothing -- carried
on legs at the other, with a rail across their tail. Six plain boxes, no
rotations at all, which after three two-rotation mistakes in this one model
was the point. The post moves out beyond the tail where it stops spearing
the bag.
Two more things came out of the same look.
The lever ran the wrong way -- from the post out into empty air, away from
everything. The end a smith pulls is the end he can reach standing at the
fire, so it now falls back over the bellows towards the hearth. And it had
nothing to pull: a rocker with no connection to the top board is a stick
resting on a post. There is now an iron link rod through the board, which is
also the only thing tying the two halves of the assembly together to the eye.
And the leather. The last round widened it so it would stop hiding between
the boards, but width and length were the same parameter, so it grew a third
longer in the same breath and the bag ended up running well past the boards
it is nailed to. Leather cannot outrun its boards -- they are what it is
fastened to. The two scales are now separate and the hide is wider (1.18 to
1.33) and shorter (0.82 to 0.9), which is the real thing and also spreads
the five end caps further apart than the old scheme managed, since they are
now staggered on purpose rather than as a by-product of the width.
+72 triangles, six boxes. 34 models, 29 094 triangles, all checks pass,
0 floating cases, GLB round-trip clean, Conformant, build clean.
Both are now at the kit's standard, so the catalogue table and the contact
sheet go with them this time.
Five things, each named from looking at a render beside its reference.
The fire bed was a smooth disc of the darkest colour in the palette, which
reads as a hole cut in the hearth with a few sparks in it. A fire bed is
BROKEN -- irregular lumps of charcoal with the glow coming up between them --
and vertex colour cannot fake that, so the lumps are modelled. They are
five-sided prisms at eight triangles each, and they are the difference
between a forge and a stone box with a black lid. Which ones glow is
decided by where they sit: the middle of a working fire is where the air
arrives.
The bellows' leather was cut NARROWER than the boards it lies between, so
it hid in the gap and the whole thing read as a stack of loose planks with
daylight through it. A bellows is a bag under pressure and its widest point
is the leather, not the wood.
The hearth's walls are slabs -- that is the saving that pays for the kerb
being real blocks -- and a slab of one colour stays a slab however much it
is mottled. Three string courses to a face, twelve boxes in all, say
COURSED without laying two hundred stones, and they stand proud because a
rib level with its wall is invisible.
The shield's paint was pastel at 0.42 saturation against a reference whose
red and blue are pigment ground in oil. And its planks are rectangles cut
to the chord of a circle, so their ends step in and out around the edge --
unavoidable, since a plank is straight and the outline is not. That is
exactly what a rim is for: a wide band of hide folded over the ends. At
0.055 of the radius it was too narrow to cover them and the silhouette came
out serrated.
Last, the cream cross between the quarters. Without it the quarters meet
edge to edge and the eye sees two colours rather than a device.
34 models, 29 022 triangles, all checks pass, 0 floating cases, GLB
round-trip clean, Conformant, build clean.
Committing these because the code should not be lost, not because they are
ready. Both pass every check and neither looks good enough to ship, and the
catalogue table and contact sheet are deliberately NOT regenerated so the
kit does not advertise them yet.
The shield opens a category the kit did not have at all -- no arms or armour
anywhere -- and its construction is right: planks cut to the chord of the
circle rather than squared off, a rawhide rim gripping their ends, an iron
boss over the hole the hand goes through, and quarters painted on the
diagonal by giving each plank's two halves different colours, which costs
no geometry because the halves exist anyway.
The forge is the other half of a smithy that has had an anvil and no fire
since early on: a raised hearth at working height, a bed that `setLit` puts
out without taking the charcoal with it, a tapering stack over the back,
and a bellows blowing through the side.
Four faults found and fixed on the way, and three of them are the same
mistake:
A two-rotation chain put the bellows boards on the wrong axis -- thickness
along Z, length along Y -- so both boards stood on edge in nearly one plane
with every face coplanar. The lever went the same way, ending up across the
bellows instead of over it and touching the post at neither end, which the
support check called a floating bar. And the shield's boss was turned -90
degrees about X instead of +90, which pointed the dome into the back of the
shield and left only its open rim showing from the front -- the reason the
boss rendered as a flat black ring.
The fourth was subtler and took three passes to see. Every plate of the
bellows -- two boards, a gusset, two ribs -- was built from one profile, so
all five ended at exactly the same x and began at exactly the same x. I
staggered the tails and the check moved to the noses; staggering both is
what fixed it.
What is still wrong, and neither is small: the forge's fire bed reads as a
black hole with a few orange specks rather than a bed of coals, and the
bellows still reads as loose boards rather than a bag of leather. The
shield's paint comes out pastel where the reference is deep, and it leans
further than it should.
34 models, 28 728 triangles, all checks pass, 0 floating cases, build clean.
