Rigging an Assembly Line Robot

A video tutorial on how to rig an assembly line robot with an armature for animation.

This video covers all the information in an article I wrote for BlenderArt Magazine.

Additionally, I went ahead and refined the rig presented in the first video with constraints and controller bones to simplify the task of animating.

Then I continued on to tidy up the rig a little and create custom bone shapes for the controller bones.

The completed .blend files are attached.

Feel free to ask questions,
Randy

Attachments

AssemblyBot1Final.blend (173 KB)AssemblyBot2Final.blend (175 KB)AssemblyBot3Final.blend (179 KB)

Thank you, great tutorial.

Thank you very much for these useful tutorials Randy.

Very usefull tips in there Randy :slight_smile:
Thanks alot.

Many Many Thanks For This Wonderful Tutorial.

Thanks alot! I’ve been searching for these kind of tutorials.

Hope I’m not too late on this thread to give thanks, Randy. I’ve been scouring youtube and all my fav tuts sites all day to learn how to rig a robotic landing gear, so I can pose meshes in the model. Excellent feedback on the vimeo tuts, you continue to talk through and mention all the keystrokes as you model making following real easy. May I suggest, using CTRL+S, “cursor to active” seems to snap the 3d cursor to the orange dot of the current mesh’s origin point. If the origin is on an axis that works for snapping the bone to you could save selecting a few verts, yes? Awesome tip on setting the Z axis up to fix rotation before parenting too. Thanks much! /cie

thanks a lot

I really enjoyed delving into an area of Blender unfamiliar to me. Your articulate vo and clear visuals made it a pleasure to learn from.

Wonderful very informative tutorial, I was looking into learning new areas of blender I had never tried, and some rigging of mechanical parts and this was just perfect.
I don’t always take the time to watch full video, in part for lack of time, in part for lack of patience, but these are well worth the time.
Many thanks.

That’s one sweet rig! Well done!