Tiger Tank, The Drum Cupola

Hi all,

I did plan to get this post out over the weekend but as things fate conspired against me (i.e. a USB stick had a untimely death when going back to a family event) so I will get this post out as part of my first double post this week. This is just a quick update on How I have been getting on with my Tiger tank and a little sneak preview of my working process.

After doing a bit of searching about the look of the Tigers there are 2 distinct types of cupola. The earlier drum cupola mounted in earlier versions gave the commander a higher point of view when viewing the battle field but left his head quite exposed. For those of you that play world of tanks you will be used to seeing the later style turret on the Tiger though I'm not quite sure where the first turret that tiger uses comes from as I have seen no imagery of that style of turret been fitted to a tiger (anyone fancy giving a comment on that would be interesting)

The asymmetric turret everyone recognises with the Tiger Tank 

What is this turret? Stock turret in WoT but when was this used?

When most of the tank from the front had 100mm of armour, which on a ideal engagement would be facing the enemy at a 45 degree angle, made the effective armour around 140mm ish thick (without the proper maths done). A direct shot to the commanders cupola assuming the shot hits on a dime, is only 75mm. Though hitting a drum design exactly at perpendicular angle is pretty hard to go when engagements for tigers were mostly at long range.

Older Drum Design Cupola

Later Tigers incorporated a flatter design which was adopted onto the kind tiger and a similar variety onto the Panther. This cupola design saved on materials needed to build it as well as reduced the vulnerability of the commanders head to fire.

Later variant of Tiger shown by the later varient of cupola, road wheels and gun mantlet

Building the Tigers early cupola really highlights how complex the tank was in comparison to Russian and American tanks. Designed for deep wading up to 4 meters the tank had to have drainage holes cur into areas which water would collate. The 10 round holes cut into he top of the cupola allowed water to drain off from the cupola lid whilst having a 18 degrees offset so the water did not run off directly into the vision slits lower down (very early editions of this cupola had drainage holes above the view ports before this error was noted). 

The thickness of the armour variates throughout the drums total structure but on the whole it maintained a 75mm thickness along the main body that covered the commanders head.

Cut through of thickness for tigers Drum Cupola

The Diameter slightly as well as shown in the image below.

Diameter of different parts of the Cupola

All these reference images for sizes and positions are from www.Tiger1.info  which has been a amazing site for technical information throughout this project so far so I can't recommend it enough.

Doing 3D meshes with cuts in always presents a challenge of how best to position your geometry to best get what you are trying to achieve whilst keeping your mesh tidy. This is again harder in cylinders as securing lines in the wrong areas cause pinching. Without creating my own tutorial which would be pointless there is loads of tutorials out there on youtube and this in particular tutorial shows exactly how I structure my geometry when I created my Cupola.

I went one step further than this guy however by figuring out the maths about where I could place my cuts along the Circumference of the cylinder to get the geometry to seat in the exact positions I wanted them too. In short I figured out the circumference, (because I knew the Diameter I could figure out the circumference which is C=πd) then set out cylinders with the exact lengths (for the view port slits in the cupola) and diameter (for the drainage holes) then bent the boolean'd mesh around a central point to create a cylinder. This may be hard to visualise in your head so ill put some pictures below.

Doing this method should in theory place the cuts from the boolean in the exact place they should be if its a perfect circle.

After a little bit more work that what I have shown you here this is where I am with the Cupola. I still have more work to go with it like creating the welds for where it connects to the turret and the hinge to model but I'm fairly pleased with the result. The cylinder still has a little bit of pinching but its pretty negligible 

The Un-Subdivided Wireframe Mesh

The Smoothed Mesh (turbo smoothed)

Smoothed Non Wireframe Result WIP

This is where I am so far, working full time means little time for me to do my own work but its important that I keep it up share and review it for my own self progression. Thats all for now, I hope you've enjoyed this little snippet of my work and keep looking back as I battle my way through this bad boy to create a banging looking Tiger tank. 

The Fearsome Tiger Tank

I mentioned in my last post that I had started modelling one of my favourite tanks of all time, The Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf E or  Tiger as  it was officially nicknamed by Ferdinand Porshe

The Order for the deveopment of a 45 ton heavy tank with a 88 caliber gun was put forward to Porsche and Henschel after Nazi Germany ran into trouble fighting T-34's and KV-1's in Operation Barbarrosa. The Current Panzer 3 that the Germans were fielding had the 5cm KwK 38 L/48 which was only capable of beating the armour of a T-34 at close range at the side or rear.

The KV-1 was impervious from every angle the panzer 3 shoot at it from, even at close range. The Flak 8.8cm was the only gun that the German forces had deployed that had the power to defeat the T-34 on its frontal armour and stop a KV-1 dead.

So the after the designs for a 45 ton Heavy tank were submitted it was the Henschek tank design that was taken forward to mass production. With 100mm of frontal armour, the Flak 8.8cm modified for tank use and the 21.35 litre 650hp engine even in its early stages it was a formidable beast.

The Tiger Tank although a superior weapon was famous for how complex its design was. The Tiger Cost double the amount that a Panzer 4 cost to produce and 4 times as much as a Stug 3. This accounted for the short number that were deployed in World War 2 and also why so many Tigers exist in decent condition today (not many survived the war and post war scrapping).

Bovington Museum houses the only running Tiger, the 131 that reciently featured in 'FURY'. A movied up untill the last fight scene believably reconstructs a tankers life in combat.

In later Stages of the war other nations tanks had started to incorporate guns that were capable of countering the tigers armament such as the British 17 Pounder Gun and the Russian 122 mm Gun.

So with the brief history of the Tiger out the way I can give you a bit of a update on what I have been doing to give reconstruct this beast of a tank.

I Decided that I would like to go about recreating a early production model of the Tiger Tank. Unlike the picture above which is a late model. After my usual reference finding and image collating

I decided to start with the Turret as this really gives the Tiger its silhouette a defining shape. I started modelling the turret and ended up finding too many discrepancy's with the blueprints that I had collected found. I did a bit more research and found a amazing site that I started working from. Most of my reference of Tigers have come from this site which is amazing by the way and I recommend anyone who is modelling a Tiger to check this out http://tiger1.info/ . Blue Prints are great for getting a overall shape but there is far too many times for my liking that blueprints don't line up perfectly so i wouldn't trust just one set by its self until I have done some proper research. 

Initial Block Out

 When I figured things Weren't quite right

Remodelling bits to measurements and specifications using old modelled parts

The turret is quite a interesting, the first thing to note its a asymmetric design with 80mm turret wall armour all around in one piece of  metal. The turret top armour in early models was 25mm thick, so having these two thicknesses positions and how they slotted together getting the innitial shape for the tank was pretty easy.

I then moved on to the loaders hatch and vent getting them nicely detailed up. www.tiger1.info has all the measurements by a guy that was building a CAD model so I cant fault the amount of resources this guy has put together to get a accurate result.

Being lazy or unwilling to try modelling welding  at this point really I have had to give it a shot to see what I could come up with so admittedly this is a work in progress to get the right results but anyone that has tried to get a good looking weld will know there isn't a lot of tutorials out there to get amazing result (if you know of some please throw them my way =) ) but I managed to get this result using deformed spheres welded together so they are all in quads. (I may get a tutorial together after I have finished to show you how I have done it if your lucky =P)

Im going to continue to Develop this weld technique so I can get it looking pucker as there is going to be many weld lines in this tank. My next focus is once I have a way to get welds looking nice I will work it into my hatch and air vent where required them move onto the commanders cupola and support bars at the front of the turret ready for the cheek mountings and mantlet to be introduced.

That's all for this week folks.