Harmony in Hazards; a Make It Bridge Contest Submission

I am a freshmen high school student from MAP Academy participating in an engineering class, my hobbies include electrical engineering, character design, manipulating Arduinos and reading books. Over the course of a month I created my submission for the Autodesk "Make It Bridge" contest and after pouring myself into this project im happy to conclude that it exceeded even my expectations. The bridges organic design incorporated key elements of the DAR bridge allowing for a more efficient load displacement especially for this span, but also a rather heavily modified watertight design. In this Instructable I will guide you through my thought process throughout the creation of my nature and human status quo defying bridge.

Supplies

TinkerCad

ZBrush

Blender with Addons:

Import-export-stl

Import-export-fbx

Bs-surfaces-bl-edition

Inset-pyide

ASUS STRIXER Laptop

Tape Measure

Photos of site

Duckduckgo

Step 1: Mesuring

Measuring the waterways span width and the estimated depth of the bridge during low tide

Step 2: Importing the DAR Bridge

Importing the DAR bridge as well as inspecting the topography

Step 3: DAR Bridge Retopologizing

Topologizing in zbrush, and smoothing out some corners i find to be detrimental to the health of the bridge long term, such as filling some gaps that could hold flying rocks and water

Step 4: Merging Two DAR Bridges Together

Moving the bridge in and out of zbrush and blender to sculpt and retopologize, finally after 4 long imports and exports it is finally combined into one bridge.

Step 5: Prototyping

3d printing and breaking the prototype to find where it is most weak to fix the weak parts of the bridge.

Step 6: Aditionall Supports and Watertightness

Creating a beam for the bottom of the bridge to help with watertightness and load displacement, alongside a creation of my Autodesk folders and organization for the future.

Step 7: Tinkercad Boolean

Using Tinkercads combine feature was useful for a combining of the many beams and water tight compartments i made in the previous step, if i used just about any other programs combining feature it wouldn't work in the way I wanted.

afterwords i retopologized manually using surfaces but i lost the image

Step 8: Substructure Construction

I created a substructure for the bridge, im very proud of the glass here as well as the supports for them, they are angled at the ocean in a way that can deflect debri, and take the minimal damage nessisary. Side effect may be radar invisibility

Step 9: Resolving Geometry Errors

Fixed all geometry errors that took 2 hours of my life. would recommend

Step 10: Experimenting With Materials

Using my previous knowlage in game design i created a metal material that i can put over the bridge and have the light reflect as it would irl.

Step 11: Adding Materials and Virtual Grass

Grass testing and 3 new materials were added and modified by me : Sand texture (not shown in photo), grass texture (in progress), brushed metal (for the bridge) and glass

Sidenote, i was thinking about adding a hdri and a shadow catcher to make it seem better in the presentation but i dont have the proper images needed to do so, sadly i would need another field trip to do that and i just cant so i settled for modeling the scene myself as close to scale as i could

Step 12: Rendering Prep

adding cameras and light sources and slight modifications to the scene to make light bounce better

Step 13: Creating the Environment and Solar Panels

Creating the envirnment with sculpting and irl photos of the site, i gave up on the sand texture because it was just going to end up a image file pasted uncomfertably over the scene

Step 14: Rendering and Future Planing

In the end i had lots of fun making the bridge, i feel as if any structure can double or even triple in usages so i created a paper listing alternative usages for the bridge and designs that any future engineer who finds my model can incorporate, i layed the groundwork for everything and my design is improvable in this manner. I hope i can win so it can kick-start my life and allow me to further my education in civil engineering and electrical engineering.