Hi folks,

Well, the general designs have been made and I have a broad date set (30 June 2017). So the next thing to do is actually start work.

I chose to start with the patient bench. There is an excellent reason to do this: basically, I was reasonably happy with my original patient bench and felt that it should be reasonably easy to refine it to my needs. And it was.

Now you may remember my bench design:

My original bench only had the bottom counterweight (red and to the right) but lacked the green and yellow counterweights. So I need to add these. When I did so, however, I felt that the silhouette was very square (apart from the red counterweight). So I put a few more angles into it. I also felt that the actual floor part of the floor mount was a bit chunky. So I made it slimmer and longer. So here is the new silhouette as created in Blender.

I think it looks a bit more interesting than both the original model and the recent design.

The other thing that I did to the model was reduce its polygon count. Now for those readers of mine unfamiliar with this terminology (we both know who you are) I’ll do a simple explanation so that you won’t feel left out. When you imagine 3D objects think of them having surfaces made up on several different “plates” (like metal plates on a suite of armour). So a flat surface on a table, for example, may end up being made up of several such plates (it’s unlikely, but let’s go with it as an example). When rendering, the computer has to perform calculations about each and every one of these plates (called polygons). However the fewer polygons it has to perform calculations upon, the faster the computer can render the image. So the idea is to run an automated process that combines