Working Watermill (Rigged, Overshot Wheel, Gears & Millstones)

A game-ready working watermill machine, built the way country grist mills were. A 3 m overshot water wheel with 36 buckets on felloe-built oak shrouds, iron spokes and hub plates, fed by a strapped timber flume with a sliding sluice gate. The iron-banded octagonal oak shaft runs on three bearing trestles to a pit wheel with 48 face cogs.

The cogs drive a 12-stave lantern wallower on the vertical stone spindle at 4:1, so the runner stone turns four times for every turn of the wheel. Gear contact was checked on every frame: cogs and staves stay in mesh and never pass through each other. Everything stands on a dressed-stone foundation with the wheel pit sunk into it, so the machine sits on any flat ground as delivered. Upstairs on the stone floor, the bed and runner stones sit in a coopered, iron-hooped tun under a hopper on its horse. A four-ribbed damsel on the spindle knocks the shoe to feed the grain, and a meal spout drops flour into the meal ark below.

Rigged on 5 bones (wheel, wallower, shoe, gate, root), so you can drive the wheel speed yourself or play the clips.

Clips: Idle, Running (loops: one wheel turn in 8 s, stones at 30 rpm, shoe shaking), StartUp (the gate opens and the wheel spins up from rest), ShutDown (the gate closes and the mill coasts to a stop), GateOpen and GateClose. StartUp and ShutDown end on poses that line up with Running, so the clips chain without a jump.

Includes FBX (skeletal mesh plus one FBX per clip for Unreal), a GLB with every clip embedded, and baked 2K colour, normal and roughness maps. The water shown in the scene renders is not part of this mesh.

• watermill
• water mill
• water wheel
• mill
• grist mill
• millstone
• gears
• mechanism
• medieval
• farm
• frontier
• prop
• game ready
• rigged
• animated