Animal Based Bridge

I am in 10th grade. The bridge I chose to renovate is in nature above a creek. I specifically selected this bridge because my family and I would bike/walk on it all the time on the way to the park as a kid. I remember always running over the bridge because I was scared that it would break, or that the weight of my entire family would pull it down. I knew it wouldn't, but I couldn't help being paranoid. Keeping that in mind, I wanted to create a creative and pretty bridge that kids wouldn't be afraid of and could stare at in wonder.

Autodesk Fusion 360 and a lot of spare time :)

I already knew that my bridge had to be themed on nature and had to be intriguing. With that idea, I set out to think about what to make. I knew you could always find animals in nature, so I designed a bridge with that in mind.

For the base of the bridge, I simply took measurements of the bridge and recreated that on Autodesk. I made a few minor changes to it by changing the height of the guard rail and changing the amount of space between each section of the bridge to what I thought looked the best. Then I added an area on the top of the guard rail where you could rest your phone, water bottle, or anything you needed on it. Then I added a small ridge so that nothing would fall over by mistake.

The width of the bridge is 100 inches. The length of the bridge is 540 inches. The guard rail is 60 inches tall.

Next came the hardest part of this project. I knew it had to have something to do with animals, so I decided to make profiles of select animals on the bridge. I didn't want to keep too many animals on the bridge, as that would make it too busy, so I just chose 6. I wanted the animals to be basic animals that you could often see in nature and around creeks. With that in mind, I decided to do a cat, dog, duck, mouse, lizard, and snake. I found some inspiration photos and uploaded them onto Autodesk and traced over them with the spline tool. After I created all the animals, I mirrored them onto the other side of the bridge so that many people could look at the design at once.

I extruded each animal to an inch thick.

Now it's all done. I've attached the .ipt, .stl, and .f3d files below.

Thank you :)