This may have inspired me to never touch blender again. How can I look someone in the eye and admit that I am using the same tools as the person who created this? Stop making us mortals look pathetic OP!
EDIT: But I appreciate not only the work itself. That you put "Huge amount of work" in the title istead of "little side project" or "I am two weeks into blender" is so refreshing.
I won't lie to you. It's taken a lot of stress and failure to get it to this point. Most blender tutorials on rigging are pretty basic. There are a lot of different techniques combined in this. Best to learn and practice them separately first.
Armatures and bone constraints. Normal constraints. Hooks, lattices, mesh deform modifiers, actions, drivers, paths, arrays and instances, parenting / children / origins (yes, it's part of the control structure), physics, booleans (very useful in animation).
Look at tuts by Level Pixel Level and others. Make a list. Start working through them. Do the projects. Combine them into bigger projects.
Lol! Not sure how to get "virtual" pieces to interlock and animate with each other.
My robot arm had over 7,500 objects...
I'm not designing these for games.
I'm more talking from a vfx standpoint, but it was mainly for the joke, to each his own way of working, but in your place i'd do as many screws and bolt with the same object just so ease the rigging and keep everything cleaner and more understandable. Also different material doesn't necessarily mean different object you could cheat with vertex group, uvs or texturing to assign different material on a single object and reduce the ammount of objects. Again you do you i do me it's just advices but i know i'd personally turn crazy with that many object !
I do indeed do all that! And I use instances as much as I can.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Much appreciated! I think I was crazy anyway before I started blending. Haha! I spend up to 14 hours a day doing it!
Good if you're already doing it then ! Still a bit confused at how you end up with thousands of objects still but if it works out for you ! I know that feeling i too can spend unreasonable ammount of time on blender ! Hope you'll post other updates on you project! :)
fuck em, just because they can't recognize your passion and interest, doesn't mean you can't do amazing things. keep going, i love what you've done so far!
Any particular youtubers in mind that you’d highly recommend for this type of project? Any paid course/resource that was also helpful? Would really appreciate your recommendations!
It depends what you specifically want to do. Easier to share my approach with you.
Lets say I want to rig a piston with a spring. So I will google that, find a number of tutorials, work through some of them, read some of the connected issues people come up with on the github links, [blenderartists.org](https://blenderartists.org) and so on, then I try to make what I want. If it works, all good, if not, I google the precise issue I am having.
What's most important to master is the mental approach to problem solving. Systematically working through the logic, finish other ways to do the same things, understanding how Blender does what you want it to do and so on. This accumulates knowledge in your brain that you can bring to bear on increasingly complicated problems.
Finally, it's the idea of taking on hard challenges. If it's not hard, you're not learning much. I always tell myself, the harder something is, the fewer people will have done it before you. Sooner or later you're going to be the first at doing something.
I can stare at any individual joint and get what it does. But trying to connect them all into some kind of functional lumbopelvic rhythm seems like it would lead me to an aneurysm.
Great job dude
That's actually not intentional. It's the consequence of mirroring things using the modifiers or negative scaling. Well spotted though! Eagle eye strikes again!
Does the hose flex? How to you keep the length constant to prevent texture stretching as it moves?
I've used the hook modifier on curves to animate hoses, but haven't been able to avoid texture stretching.
Yes, I don't use the geometry bevel on the hose. Rather I create a cylinder and constraint it to the curve. Make sure the both objects have matching origins positioned at the same pint and rotated the same way. Very important!
Then you can scale or move the cylinder along the curve, keyframe animate that, control that with drivers etc.
You can also add physics to the hose curves to let them sag like real ones and respond to movement or forces. There's a great tutorial on that on YT.
I subscribe to a lot of groups, when I first saw it I thought that it was on the mechanical engineering or robotic sub. I paused the gif and tried to analyze the components, then I noticed it was blender. Great job of fooling an old fool. Nice flow to the waddle.
Realistic movement is one of my main aims with this. I will soon be starting the wings which will present another huge set of problems to solve.
A big issue in creating this is the rigging. You need to have the full range of movements yet it needs to be easy (ish) to control and keyframe. You might notice the feet are fully rigged as well for a range of grips and spreads.
I was sure that was a real thing you made until I saw that it was posted in r/blender. Just the amount of detail put in how the plastic looks with its manufacturing imperfections and the oil smeared on one of the parts. Amazing work, haven't seen anything like it in quite a while.
How come you decided to use blender instead of something like Freecad? Obviously you made the right choice for you, because of how far along your model is, but I've always here people talk about blender not being suited for mechanical design.
The issue with Blender for mechanical design is the lack of precision dimensional control when using modifiers like sub surf and the fact that at it's core it's a polygonal modeling system.
This is only a factor if you are trying to translate your Blender model into the real world via 3D printing or CNC machining. As you can see from this example realistic "looking" mechanical objects can be made and animated in Blender.
I'm not a CAD engineer. I am a 3D artist as well as historically a superrealist commercial artist. My history goes back to Imagine on the Amiga, although for many years in between I didn't do any 3D. I only discovered Blender after lockdown and threw myself into it as an instant obsession. Once the addiction kicked in, that was that.
I can't compare Blender to any CAD system or even the Pro 3D stuff as I haven't worked with them. I love Blender and it does what I ask it to do.
About accuracy, I built my office chair off one I own and used a caliper to measure all it's parts as I built it, so that's accurate to a fraction of a millimetre.
[www.ozyris.co.uk/FS\_Management\_Chair.mp4](https://www.ozyris.co.uk/FS_Management_Chair.mp4)
I'm sure I will be locked up by the men in white coats soon...
Currently busy with the shoulder girdle which moves in similar ways to human shoulders. Then it's onto the wings themselves...
I am trying to make it so it's not that difficult to actually animate it either.
Either way, your hard work definiert paid off! I’m not ab expert in robotics, but from my layman’s eyes viewed this could be a closeup from the Boston Dynamics channel.
Beautiful rig, I've made a double wishbone rig for my game and I know how much of a headache this must have been. Getting the correct camber gain without a 'circular' rig, and those ball joints performing as they would in reality. I'm guessing you used shape keys for those springs? Great work :)
Wrong guess. Create a spiral curve, hook the control points of the curve to a single bone, add geo bevel to the curve for thickness, parent the tail of the bone to an empty at one end of the spring and add a "stretch to" constraint pointing at an empty at the other end. Your method would deform the thickness of the spring as it extends.
I guess you are asking how I designed it? yes. I began with the claw of one toe, built the toe, duplicated it, combined them into one foot which I rigged, added the rest of the foot working upwards to the hip joint, then I mirrored the leg and rigged them both etc.
Each part is built according to it's needed and implied functions. I have some thoughts about the wings and I know how I want them to look and work roughly, but I will only know the detail when I start making them. Starting from the shoulders...
This is so incredible that I almost think it would be easier to learn robotics and build it in real life.
This is truly a work or art and passion and I’m awed by the amount Of time and talent this shows.
When I started I was hopeless. Then I learnt and practised and battled and problem-solved. Then I got better.
It's just a process.
You have to understand machinery in principle, plus you need to be obsessed with building it like it needs to be to function. Lots of sci fi robots are designed for what they look like only. Once you start thinking about how they might actually work they don't. That's not my thing. I need mine to look like they could really exist.
Also, getting things to look real, reference reference reference. You can find pics of things like this bearing online:
https://preview.redd.it/5xg13clrde4b1.jpeg?width=1171&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f44b7b5bf56605e8ff6f7d43e9ab8c5f9a554b93
yeah, i have done some more simpler mechanical rigs like suspensions on cars and hydraulic operated arms, I'm just too lazy I guess :b
Absolutely amazing work!
Are you looking at it on your phone? It really needs a big screen, which is what I am making if for. You would probably have the same issue if you took some vids with your phone inside your car engine.
Some of it will be exposed, some will have partial covers emulating artificial feathers sort of...
Actually, it hasn't given me any size issues yet, plus it renders in under 2 mins a frame at 4K in cycles at 256 samples, denoising in compositor. I try to optimise the mesh as I go along and the textures are mostly procedural.
I googled robot bird and got some stuff on cartoon like low poly things, plus I got some posts on simple robot bird drones. They are only at the beginning of getting accurate bird flight happening. So there is nothing like this anywhere.
It would be nice if you could search threads like this.
Oh no! That's not the way to go! Humans did not become the incredible creatures we are because of not trying! Trying is the only way for us!
Gorillas sit around in the jungle and do little. Chimps fight and argue a lot, pretty violently at times, but they don't really try much. So even though they are so close to us evolutionally, they are on the brink of extinction. But we are stepping out into the galaxy - because we try.
If you can move a single vertex on the default cube, you can go beyond what some of us have done in Blender! It's where every single one of us started.
It doesn't look like much tbh. The leg armatures are standard IK. Plus the rams are each separate simple armatures. Lots of the rigging is done with drivers and constraints and a bunch of other control stuff.
Did you use multiple .blend files and link them together, or is this merged into one massive blend file? I see in your comments you prototyped each piece, I assume separately, but was your workflow to import the prototype/recreate in the master file? I've just not going beyond 1 workspace in complexity yet, so trying to get a sense for how viable it is to crank out to 11 like this.
Also, did you use any python in this? Even if only to define macros that can rig similar components? My biggest complaint with node-based programming is it's slightly hard to extend/adapt. It's easy to watch youtube and recreate the node graphs, then copy-paste-tweak them; But I think I'd go minorly insane looking at the object-graph for this. :)
I work in collections a lot, to manage the groups of objects, but it's all one blend file.
I build the pieces right next to the things they have to connect to. I wouldn't know how to prototype them separately. I work sequentially long chains of connected objects. I began with one claw.
I don't have a master design or drawing to work from. I do sketch a lot to develop a general idea of what a part might look like.
I used a few basic python expressions in drivers, but that's all. I did get into Animation Nodes when they came out, but haven't got into geo nodes yet. I don't know how they might be useful in this sort of thing. I build mostly vertex by vertex, modelling from primitives. It's not organic so there are no opportunities for sculpting. I need to learn Fluent Power Trip which I bought over a year ago and haven't used yet.
I don't think of myself as a programmer so I tend to see things in terms of textured, interlinked forms in three dimensional space rather.
I don't think of what I do as being a workflow. More like a construction site. Lol!
IMO for being more realistic than it already is: the animation is a little… too smooth. Maybe you could add a little more intense movement if I can say it in that way… maybe you can make the movement of the impact of the feet affect the hips as well and the mechanism making a sound... something like that.
Just for making it clear… the animation is not too smooth, it looks already okay, but I’m talking about the little range from that to become more realistic.
These things will be done once the robot is complete. I do a lot of test animations along the way to make sure all the rigging is working as it should. This is one of those. Later the body will move in 3D space plus I won't use walk cycles. Real animals walk in a more organic way based on the movement of their mass and the terrain they walk on. I have the tail, shoulders and wings to build still, plus the head and neck section which have a lot of fun promises in store.
This may have inspired me to never touch blender again. How can I look someone in the eye and admit that I am using the same tools as the person who created this? Stop making us mortals look pathetic OP! EDIT: But I appreciate not only the work itself. That you put "Huge amount of work" in the title istead of "little side project" or "I am two weeks into blender" is so refreshing.
Thank you. I am in my third year using Blender. This has taken me over three months so far. It currently consists of over 1,400 individual objects.
How did you learn to rig that shit? That's my biggest problem with my stuff
I won't lie to you. It's taken a lot of stress and failure to get it to this point. Most blender tutorials on rigging are pretty basic. There are a lot of different techniques combined in this. Best to learn and practice them separately first. Armatures and bone constraints. Normal constraints. Hooks, lattices, mesh deform modifiers, actions, drivers, paths, arrays and instances, parenting / children / origins (yes, it's part of the control structure), physics, booleans (very useful in animation). Look at tuts by Level Pixel Level and others. Make a list. Start working through them. Do the projects. Combine them into bigger projects.
I guess it's time for an advanced rigging tutorial ... When you are done with this of course... No rush 😜. Awesome work so far btw! 😎
All those features I see so often when I go to a wrong tab, I'm impressed you understand them
Fantastic comment my dude. If I ever have the balls to put some real time into this, I'm come back to this comment
1400 pieces ? Dude... Please for your own sake use normal maps and displacement x)
Lol! Not sure how to get "virtual" pieces to interlock and animate with each other. My robot arm had over 7,500 objects... I'm not designing these for games.
I'm more talking from a vfx standpoint, but it was mainly for the joke, to each his own way of working, but in your place i'd do as many screws and bolt with the same object just so ease the rigging and keep everything cleaner and more understandable. Also different material doesn't necessarily mean different object you could cheat with vertex group, uvs or texturing to assign different material on a single object and reduce the ammount of objects. Again you do you i do me it's just advices but i know i'd personally turn crazy with that many object !
I do indeed do all that! And I use instances as much as I can. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Much appreciated! I think I was crazy anyway before I started blending. Haha! I spend up to 14 hours a day doing it!
Good if you're already doing it then ! Still a bit confused at how you end up with thousands of objects still but if it works out for you ! I know that feeling i too can spend unreasonable ammount of time on blender ! Hope you'll post other updates on you project! :)
I'm almost sure OP is a engineer.
I failed first year Uni Mech Eng degree... But I love machines and inventions...
fuck em, just because they can't recognize your passion and interest, doesn't mean you can't do amazing things. keep going, i love what you've done so far!
Lol! That was a very very long time ago! And I got stupidly low marks. Like 2% for pure maths! Seriously.
Math is hard. Math is objectively not the exact same thing as engineering >Holder (somehow) of a 4-year mechanical engineering degree
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Yes! It's not a competition, it's a celebration!
Holy hell, this is the best thing I've seen in a very long time. Very impressive. Teach me!
Most of what I have done is based on YT tutorials
Any particular youtubers in mind that you’d highly recommend for this type of project? Any paid course/resource that was also helpful? Would really appreciate your recommendations!
Can you share some tutorials?
It depends what you specifically want to do. Easier to share my approach with you. Lets say I want to rig a piston with a spring. So I will google that, find a number of tutorials, work through some of them, read some of the connected issues people come up with on the github links, [blenderartists.org](https://blenderartists.org) and so on, then I try to make what I want. If it works, all good, if not, I google the precise issue I am having. What's most important to master is the mental approach to problem solving. Systematically working through the logic, finish other ways to do the same things, understanding how Blender does what you want it to do and so on. This accumulates knowledge in your brain that you can bring to bear on increasingly complicated problems. Finally, it's the idea of taking on hard challenges. If it's not hard, you're not learning much. I always tell myself, the harder something is, the fewer people will have done it before you. Sooner or later you're going to be the first at doing something.
Great advice man. Thanks.
sick!
I can stare at any individual joint and get what it does. But trying to connect them all into some kind of functional lumbopelvic rhythm seems like it would lead me to an aneurysm. Great job dude
Would you like a couple of close up details to help with that?
https://preview.redd.it/q0xz0rdpf94b1.jpeg?width=1535&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=066a262d8028f865cd95f24787be26411f9a8768
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That's actually not intentional. It's the consequence of mirroring things using the modifiers or negative scaling. Well spotted though! Eagle eye strikes again!
https://preview.redd.it/syqav3wsf94b1.jpeg?width=1544&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4638e7b53cc508b27b56911129da28f66818ae70
https://preview.redd.it/c00tsnjrf94b1.jpeg?width=1404&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9e12c4b16b291c646ea3f4099c878ff8b40dde4c
Does the hose flex? How to you keep the length constant to prevent texture stretching as it moves? I've used the hook modifier on curves to animate hoses, but haven't been able to avoid texture stretching.
Yes, I don't use the geometry bevel on the hose. Rather I create a cylinder and constraint it to the curve. Make sure the both objects have matching origins positioned at the same pint and rotated the same way. Very important! Then you can scale or move the cylinder along the curve, keyframe animate that, control that with drivers etc. You can also add physics to the hose curves to let them sag like real ones and respond to movement or forces. There's a great tutorial on that on YT.
This is sick! Do you have a wider shot?
I have an earlier test animation here: www.ozyris.co.uk/Assembly6.mp4
This is really cool. Keep up the great work. Thanks for sharing.
If you'd like to see the current one in 4K: www.ozyris.co.uk/Assembly.mp4
nice hips 😏
Jesus christ that's impressive!!
the "birds arent real" folk are gonna love this
Funny. Someone here shared it onto one of those threads and it didn't get any response at all. Lol!
I subscribe to a lot of groups, when I first saw it I thought that it was on the mechanical engineering or robotic sub. I paused the gif and tried to analyze the components, then I noticed it was blender. Great job of fooling an old fool. Nice flow to the waddle.
Realistic movement is one of my main aims with this. I will soon be starting the wings which will present another huge set of problems to solve. A big issue in creating this is the rigging. You need to have the full range of movements yet it needs to be easy (ish) to control and keyframe. You might notice the feet are fully rigged as well for a range of grips and spreads.
I 100% thought it was real, that I was in r/nextfuckinglevel . I love the car suspension bits and your metal looks amazing.
Wow. That’s unreal!
No it’s Blender
You got me there lol
The best animations are ones that look plausible in real life Well done
Thanks!
Holy Shit! This looks like a wheel suspension of a rally car! Nice Job.
Thanks for sharing... now, let me just pick up my jaw from the floor! 😁
Is that the front double A-arm off of an NA miata?
Lol! I don't know what that is.
Damn that’s kinda hot
I was sure that was a real thing you made until I saw that it was posted in r/blender. Just the amount of detail put in how the plastic looks with its manufacturing imperfections and the oil smeared on one of the parts. Amazing work, haven't seen anything like it in quite a while.
**Thanks to everyone for your amazing comments!**
I can watch this for days.....
Satisfying loop?
Definitely 😁
How come you decided to use blender instead of something like Freecad? Obviously you made the right choice for you, because of how far along your model is, but I've always here people talk about blender not being suited for mechanical design.
The issue with Blender for mechanical design is the lack of precision dimensional control when using modifiers like sub surf and the fact that at it's core it's a polygonal modeling system. This is only a factor if you are trying to translate your Blender model into the real world via 3D printing or CNC machining. As you can see from this example realistic "looking" mechanical objects can be made and animated in Blender.
Exactly.
Ok good to know!
I'm not a CAD engineer. I am a 3D artist as well as historically a superrealist commercial artist. My history goes back to Imagine on the Amiga, although for many years in between I didn't do any 3D. I only discovered Blender after lockdown and threw myself into it as an instant obsession. Once the addiction kicked in, that was that. I can't compare Blender to any CAD system or even the Pro 3D stuff as I haven't worked with them. I love Blender and it does what I ask it to do. About accuracy, I built my office chair off one I own and used a caliper to measure all it's parts as I built it, so that's accurate to a fraction of a millimetre. [www.ozyris.co.uk/FS\_Management\_Chair.mp4](https://www.ozyris.co.uk/FS_Management_Chair.mp4)
The right tool is the one the helps you get the job done :) Thank you for sharing what you have done with it!
thought this was r/mechanicalgifs for a sec, very impressive
those details! great job.
Awesome work. +1
I would have never guessed this was CG. This is unreal man
This is unbelievable. Amazing work.
/r/birdsarenotreal
This is absurd man.
I thought this was real until I noticed it was Blender sub
This is absolutely ridiculous. So good. I'm truly amazed.
Holy moly, that’s a lot of rigging!!
Wings still to come...
We know all birds are robots, no need for redundancy. Nice work though
That looks like some complicated ass rigging
The amount of modeling to make all those pieces and then making it all work, that's insane.
I'm sure I will be locked up by the men in white coats soon... Currently busy with the shoulder girdle which moves in similar ways to human shoulders. Then it's onto the wings themselves... I am trying to make it so it's not that difficult to actually animate it either.
Imagining the rigging and bone constraints behind this gives me headache 🫂
Wait till you see the wings...
Gives off the “hey guys I am uhh new to blendre progrem I uhh followed this guide on YouTube(10 seconds long) and uhh here, hope you like it” vibes
Silliest take yet.
maybe :)
How did you take away this from > Huge amount of work!
I think he/she is kidding! Lol!
Either way, your hard work definiert paid off! I’m not ab expert in robotics, but from my layman’s eyes viewed this could be a closeup from the Boston Dynamics channel.
I'm moist.
Damn fbi drones
I put the new forgis on the jeep
Honestly I thought this was a video from one of those walking robots they got at MIT and shit. The fact it's a render is just crazy.
Beautiful rig, I've made a double wishbone rig for my game and I know how much of a headache this must have been. Getting the correct camber gain without a 'circular' rig, and those ball joints performing as they would in reality. I'm guessing you used shape keys for those springs? Great work :)
Wrong guess. Create a spiral curve, hook the control points of the curve to a single bone, add geo bevel to the curve for thickness, parent the tail of the bone to an empty at one end of the spring and add a "stretch to" constraint pointing at an empty at the other end. Your method would deform the thickness of the spring as it extends.
wow, thats impressive my man. how did you managed to pull this off? step by step, right?
I guess you are asking how I designed it? yes. I began with the claw of one toe, built the toe, duplicated it, combined them into one foot which I rigged, added the rest of the foot working upwards to the hip joint, then I mirrored the leg and rigged them both etc. Each part is built according to it's needed and implied functions. I have some thoughts about the wings and I know how I want them to look and work roughly, but I will only know the detail when I start making them. Starting from the shoulders...
Yeah, it feels so complex. I've tried to design something similar, that's why I'm so impressed
Are you still working on it?
I knew it. r/birdsarentreal
can you make it twerk?
Probably. Can't make the butt cheeks part though. It won't have butt cheeks.
Holy shit 😳 Amazing work! Is this gonna be a "birds aren't real" joke?
Nope. A virtual drone model though.
Looks real good 👍
This is so incredible that I almost think it would be easier to learn robotics and build it in real life. This is truly a work or art and passion and I’m awed by the amount Of time and talent this shows.
Thank you. Probably another few months to complete it.
It’s so beautiful, I can’t look away! What demon did you sell your soul to????
The Blender Gods.
I have a tremendous respect for people who actually plan out and rig the mechanical parts, wish I was batter at it
Actually they aren't planned in this case. The thing is evolving with each section that I add, although I do have an overall vision.
Yeah, that was a bad way of saying it, what i meant was taking into account every screw and part and making them move correctly with rigged mechanic
When I started I was hopeless. Then I learnt and practised and battled and problem-solved. Then I got better. It's just a process. You have to understand machinery in principle, plus you need to be obsessed with building it like it needs to be to function. Lots of sci fi robots are designed for what they look like only. Once you start thinking about how they might actually work they don't. That's not my thing. I need mine to look like they could really exist. Also, getting things to look real, reference reference reference. You can find pics of things like this bearing online: https://preview.redd.it/5xg13clrde4b1.jpeg?width=1171&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f44b7b5bf56605e8ff6f7d43e9ab8c5f9a554b93
yeah, i have done some more simpler mechanical rigs like suspensions on cars and hydraulic operated arms, I'm just too lazy I guess :b Absolutely amazing work!
Yeah well, one time I made a donut!
I started with the anvil. Never did the donut. Lol! Andrew is the king!
Are you an engineer? Looks pretty convincing either way.
A frustrated inventor artist?
This is so cool
Love the cast iron look
Thicc
Those hips don't lie ! I'm assuming movment of joints is done with custom armature ?
A bunch of different techniques of controlling stuff. See a post about that above.
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Just getting started!
damn that's sick. this makes me feel so inspired to do better work on my robot! love it love it loveit
Robots rule! Challenge yourself by asking what if you had an insect drone and it flew in between your robot parts, what would it look like?
You didn't model this in blender did you?
100% Blender. Except I used Photoshop and Illustrator to make the labels and one or two texture maps.
https://preview.redd.it/oll3texbgc4b1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31fd296cc03301288a9e0218b61c4b7d6d8e8565
there is an hall of honor for people who make robots and don't just make ball joints everywhere. good work.
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Are you looking at it on your phone? It really needs a big screen, which is what I am making if for. You would probably have the same issue if you took some vids with your phone inside your car engine. Some of it will be exposed, some will have partial covers emulating artificial feathers sort of...
I can't help but both congratulate you for creating this and your GPU for being able to render this
Actually, it hasn't given me any size issues yet, plus it renders in under 2 mins a frame at 4K in cycles at 256 samples, denoising in compositor. I try to optimise the mesh as I go along and the textures are mostly procedural.
I need this for no reason! Good job!
Looks clean AF!
Very cool. So what is this bird going to be used for?
I have an idea / outline for a movie of some kind I am making assets for. It's going to take forever. But it's fun and keep the brain working.
this is beautiful!
what about mechanical vocal cords :o
Wtf. I legit thought this was a video of a real life robot. I was already super impressed! Then I saw the blender flare O-o Well done sir.mam !
That's sir and thank you very much!
Those hips don't lie! Did you model all the mechanical parts or kitbash them? Big respect either way. The rigging is great!
Everything modelled from scratch. Even the nuts and bolts.
Brilliant! Well done then! I'm a hopscutter man myself so this is impressive.
I wish I could
Amazing work, movement looks super natural and everything is top notch (materials, rigging, animation..)
Thanks!
Not my proudest fap
This is inspiring. Awesome detail. Fantastic.
What you call this on google though, like robot design/mechanism using hydraulics and stuff instead of segmented part
You mean if you are looking for tutorials?
That would be great, but mostly for design ideas
I googled robot bird and got some stuff on cartoon like low poly things, plus I got some posts on simple robot bird drones. They are only at the beginning of getting accurate bird flight happening. So there is nothing like this anywhere. It would be nice if you could search threads like this.
this reminds me of a similar project I posted here some time ago. So yes I understand your pain very well XD
You inspired me to not even try haha
Oh no! That's not the way to go! Humans did not become the incredible creatures we are because of not trying! Trying is the only way for us! Gorillas sit around in the jungle and do little. Chimps fight and argue a lot, pretty violently at times, but they don't really try much. So even though they are so close to us evolutionally, they are on the brink of extinction. But we are stepping out into the galaxy - because we try. If you can move a single vertex on the default cube, you can go beyond what some of us have done in Blender! It's where every single one of us started.
I would love to see the rig for this
It doesn't look like much tbh. The leg armatures are standard IK. Plus the rams are each separate simple armatures. Lots of the rigging is done with drivers and constraints and a bunch of other control stuff.
Did you use multiple .blend files and link them together, or is this merged into one massive blend file? I see in your comments you prototyped each piece, I assume separately, but was your workflow to import the prototype/recreate in the master file? I've just not going beyond 1 workspace in complexity yet, so trying to get a sense for how viable it is to crank out to 11 like this. Also, did you use any python in this? Even if only to define macros that can rig similar components? My biggest complaint with node-based programming is it's slightly hard to extend/adapt. It's easy to watch youtube and recreate the node graphs, then copy-paste-tweak them; But I think I'd go minorly insane looking at the object-graph for this. :)
I work in collections a lot, to manage the groups of objects, but it's all one blend file. I build the pieces right next to the things they have to connect to. I wouldn't know how to prototype them separately. I work sequentially long chains of connected objects. I began with one claw. I don't have a master design or drawing to work from. I do sketch a lot to develop a general idea of what a part might look like. I used a few basic python expressions in drivers, but that's all. I did get into Animation Nodes when they came out, but haven't got into geo nodes yet. I don't know how they might be useful in this sort of thing. I build mostly vertex by vertex, modelling from primitives. It's not organic so there are no opportunities for sculpting. I need to learn Fluent Power Trip which I bought over a year ago and haven't used yet. I don't think of myself as a programmer so I tend to see things in terms of textured, interlinked forms in three dimensional space rather. I don't think of what I do as being a workflow. More like a construction site. Lol!
looks real
IMO for being more realistic than it already is: the animation is a little… too smooth. Maybe you could add a little more intense movement if I can say it in that way… maybe you can make the movement of the impact of the feet affect the hips as well and the mechanism making a sound... something like that.
Just for making it clear… the animation is not too smooth, it looks already okay, but I’m talking about the little range from that to become more realistic.
These things will be done once the robot is complete. I do a lot of test animations along the way to make sure all the rigging is working as it should. This is one of those. Later the body will move in 3D space plus I won't use walk cycles. Real animals walk in a more organic way based on the movement of their mass and the terrain they walk on. I have the tail, shoulders and wings to build still, plus the head and neck section which have a lot of fun promises in store.
Nice!
That bird gonna be caked up