This animated, 3D model of a pocket watch was conceived as a background for an old portfolio site of mine. It’s intended to showcase an eye for detail, my capacity for adapting and learning how to build new things, and to show off my 3D modelling, mapping and geometry skills.
* The “High Quality” version will load a 14mb model with around 200,000 faces. This may cause issues on low performance or low memory devices.
After many, many hours of reading and watching documentaries on clock and watch mechanisms, a history of what lead to the more modern designs, gearing, power retention and how all these things fit together, I set about designing my very own pocket watch.
Granted, it’s not as slimline as commercially available watches, it’s quite cartoonish even in it’s physical proportions, however, it is a fully working design with proper, meshing gear ratios, which you can see by stripping the casing away and playing with the timing controls.
The only parts of this watch which can’t be 3D printed are the power spring, hairspring and balance end stones. In theory, if you had these parts, the rest of the design could be 3D printed and would keep time well.
The design features a fully working regulator, complete with a balance mechanism and escapement wheel, which again can be seen by stripping back parts of the casing until these parts become visible.
The timepiece is textured with a highly reflective gold map, which uses an environment map to give the illusion of reflections from within a room. It also features normal mapped engraving on the rear, which complements the environment mapping nicely!
This model was authored using CAD and DXF gear generation software. A simple spreadsheet and calculator was used to figure out the gear sizes and ratios, as well as some trial and error. Rendering is done on the web using the THREE.js library.