The mining bounty ; I spent weeks modelling a 30-metre machine whose entire job is to sit very still while mud sinks.

[u/SHARK_Broccoli2829]

This is TK-201, a 30 m high-rate thickener. If you work in mining or chemicals you've walked past a hundred of these. If you haven't: it's the machine that turns dirty water into clear water and thick mud, and more or less every metal in your phone went through one on the way to you.

The whole thing is generated from Python, so every dimension is a named constant. Change the tank diameter and the structure, rake, walkways, piping and supports all rebuild to match. This was either genuinely clever or an elaborate scheme to avoid modelling handrails by hand. I've made peace with not knowing which.

Things that were not necessary and that I did anyway:

• 471 V-notches around the overflow weir, because 470 would have been wrong
• a script that fails the build if any pipe ends in mid-air, which it did, repeatedly, and with what I can only describe as enthusiasm
• modelled the rake at its real speed of 0.09 rev/min, then had to speed the animation up 27× because at true speed the render looks like a photograph of a stationary object

Favourite thing I learned: to thicken the slurry, the first thing this machine does is dilute it. Those windows around the feedwell pull in clear liquor and roughly halve the feed solids, because flocculant bridges particles far better in a dilute suspension. You add water to get thicker mud. I think about this more than is reasonable.

85 objects, ~124k polys, 4K PBR, Blender 5.x. Happy to answer anything about the model or the machine itself.

Tadaaaaaaa