Umbo!
Meet Umbo the beloved elephant! Similar to Jumbo, Umbo is a joyous male African bush elephant, though he has developed short stubby legs due to his rotund size. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Umbo does not have any ears 🙁
Umbo the elephant in all his glory
Umbos’ Journey
I have used CAD before for other classes in middle and high school, as well as in my EN1 class during my freshman year. As such, I wanted to challenge myself to make something a little bit more creative. For this assignment, I used SolidWorks, which I had used once a while ago. I was somewhat familiar with my way around the program but I had forgotten how clunky it can be at times. The hardest part was trying to be efficient with my time. I really want to learn how to optimize my workflow so that I can be more efficient when designing and be able to simplify something that may take multiple steps into just a few steps. In the following sections, I briefly discuss my design process and what I had trouble with and/or learned.
The Body
The body was pretty easy to make by just extruding an ellipse and adding holes for the rods. I played around with the fillet tool and settled on using the “conic radius” setting because I thought it looked best. Most of the time spent on the body was a result of me trying to figure out what shape looked best/least worst.
The Head
The head was a bit annoying to make because there weren’t any flat surfaces to create sketches on once I made the sphere base. After a bit of playing around, I figured out how to make my own planes and define/constrain them. I ended up making 5 planes, four to make each hole in the head and one to make the eyes. This part might have taken the longest because I spent a lot of time messing around with the planes as well as changing the eyes.
The Trunk
The trunk didn’t take too much time to take. I figured it would be easier to make it by using the sweep tool, so that’s what I did. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to taper, though, thinking about it now, I realize that it might be possible if I make another sketch at the other end of the sweep with a circle of a smaller radius.
The Feet
The feet took some time to make because I was trying to figure out how to make the toes. I wanted to make them a lot more conical, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I settled for the classic fillet. The toes themselves were made using the circular sketch pattern tool, which I find to be pretty useful.
The Humble Rod
The holes seen in the previous parts are all made to fit this 15mm rod that serves as a connecter pin for the parts. I now realize that this part is actually completely unnecessary and I don’t know why I made this instead of just incorporating it into the parts I already made. The only part that doesn’t use it is the trunk.
Concluding Remarks
I really wanted to add more details, but I just did not have the time to do so. I might revisit this to use for the 3D printing assignment and at least finish making the ears so that Umbo looks more like an elephant. Overall, I enjoyed the assignment and wish I could’ve spent more time on it.