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Robot Arm

I began writing this post in a frenzied panic as I realized I had forgotten to make a blog post this week. I quickly looked up some Blender tutorials on concepts I hadn't worked on before and found one on constraints for a robotic arm. Since I was on a tight schedule, I followed the tutorial to quickly get something rough done. After, I would add details and things not in the tutorial to up the quality.

The model is very basic but following the tutorial helped me learn some good practices when making models. Keeping certain parts separate and using "snap cursor to selected" to add parts in object mode before changing them in edit mode is very important when your model has multiple things that aren't joined together. Constant swapping between edit mode and object mode is confusing at first, but it's very useful if you want to do something like have the origin of a cylinder be at its base rather than the center.

The arm has some hydraulic-looking things that use constraints. Constraints restrict the object to do some certain action towards/on/with a target object. In the arm, the hydraulic tube things are constrained to one another to track to each other. This means they will extend and contract while the joints are moved around.

After this, the arm was basically done, but I wanted to add some more detail so it didn't look so blocky. I cut out parts of the arm and added some pins to hold everything together. I also edited the surface elements of the arm to make it look more three-dimensional instead of just flat surfaces.


Finally, a quick coat of paint and some animating later, here is the final result.






Comments

  1. JamesNovember 15, 2022 at 8:47 PM

    Bruh that animation is sick as hell. How'd you do that in such a short time.

    ReplyDelete

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