Background
Cars are complicated machines. If you've ever tried to learn how a car works it can be intimidating. Most people give up without even trying, taking it to the local shop for a repair that can range into the thousands of dollars.I wanted to create an app that will help others understand how their car works in a visually appealing way. I started working on this project in my spare time over a year ago, and it has matured to the point of being released in the Google Play store. This is a great start, but I need more content. I work a day job and have a family so it can be difficult to find the time and resources necessary to continue moving forward.
Design
The design starts by selecting the component to model. The first component that I modeled was the starter, so we'll start there. The most critical element of the modelling is to have the component in hand. This can be challenging if you don't have spare starters (and other car parts) lying around.The modelling is done in SketchUp. This software is free to use and has a large community of modelers and helpful videos for getting starter.
From this point a few tweaks are made to the header of the binary file before loading it into the Weekend Mechanic 3d project. This Android software is capable of loading the 3d binary model into OpenGL ES for 3d manipulation at the touch of your fingers.
Some models I have taken a step further and created 3d animations of how the component works. These animations are created by importing the COLLADA output from SketchUp into Blender, another free and open-source program. Blender is great for creating photo-realistic animations that are only limited by your imagination and understanding of how to use Blender itself!
