Description

In this exercise, students will practice modeling, rigging, and animating a hard-surface robot arm.

Instructions

  1. Watch the tutorials.
  2. Design a unique robot arm made of at least 4 main parts, including a gripper, a forearm, an upper arm, and a piston. You may add additional elements as you see fit.
    • Create a rig for hard objects (do not download an existing rig)
    • include at least one rigged piston.
    • Include and IK system to control and animate the arm.
  3. Create a short animation that shows off the capability of your robot arm design and rig.
  4. Set up a camera to frame the shot.
  5. To create a video of the viewport’s animation, save the file and set the render settings output folder to the project folder. Under File Format, choose FFMpeg Video, change the encoding format to MPEG-4.
  6. Choose View ⟶ Viewport Render Animation to create the animation.
  7. Save as LASTNAME-robot-rig-animation.zip and upload to the submission dropbox.
  8. Double check that you’ve included all files and that your .zip file can be downloaded and opened. This should include:
    • .blend file
    • .mp4 video file
Learning Objectives

  1. Practice setting up Inverse Kinematics (IK) bone constraints.
  2. Practice hard surface modeling.
  3. Become familiarized with creating and binding an armature for hard surface models.

Blender Tutorials

To get a deeper understanding of how Blender's rigging tools work, have a look these tutorials

    Introduction To IK Part 1

    Rig A Multi Stage-Piston

    How To Rig A Piston Part 1

    How To Rig A Piston Part 2

    Rubric

    Criteria Description Assessment Weight
    Attention to Detail This criteria looks at if the assignment was submitted on time, if each step was completed to a high degree of accuracy, and if file naming conventions were followed. 5 pts
    Learning by doing (Completed all steps) This criteria assess whether you completed the assignment's given set of instructions. This indirectly infers how well you acquired foundational skills and theory. 5 pts