Progress report - 12/1/23

G'day all, welcome to 2023 - hope the new year is treating you all well.

Let's get right into it shall we? Bren L4.

So, where'd we leave off?.. oh, all the way back there. WELL.
One of the first things I got working on after finishing the insides of the magazine well and breech-face is adding the barrel. Easy enough. Left a dimensionally correct placeholder on the front for the flash hider and front sight (wasn't keen on getting deep into them before I had more of the gun done, they're complex and very critical in terms of the sights).

Next to go in was the stock. Again, pretty simple. There was some more cuts and parts that were added later, but the main shape was figured out and laid in, butt plate put in place. I can't recall if I mentioned it last time, but damn is that much faster to lay down geometry in. After completing this, I took 2 weeks break (Christmas, etc).

Resuming on the 3rd, kicked into the last major parts group - the Fire control group.  While mostly it was straight forward, I did spend considerable time on the back end of it, because how critical it is to the vibe of the gun from the First-person perspective. 

The next major task was on I'd been putting off and somewhat dreading - the right-hand side of the receiver. I wasn't sure how I was going to do it. I started with an experiment of using Boolean operations to add and carve the side and... it worked really well - more so than I'd expected given the headache Boolean ops are in 3DS Max (though, considering how much blender has been everywhere else, I should have half expected it). Cut the groove in the stock for the charging handle while I was at it.

Somewhere around this point I made a point of using Blender's annotations to note things that were still missing - much easier to reference than physical post-its, when you have arrows pointing directly at the spots. Oh, and I put in the barrel locking lever. And you know what? It's mostly only small parts left now.

So to not make this just a narrated breakdown of what part got made what day, the rest of the time from the 6th to now has just been me finishing small parts. Things like the Tripod mounting points, and retention pins.

Most recent parts completed are the front sight/muzzle brake, and the rear sight assembly- One made with the magic of booleans, the other just with classic extrusion.

That brings us all the way up to date with the Bren. I've started on the bipod, which is truly the last thing that affects the outline of this thing.  If you'd like to see any of the images in here in more detail, they're available through this imgur album  

That'll be it from me for now,
See you in the next one where I assume I'll be already UV Mapping or some such ridiculous nonsense.

Toadie Out.