Circular Escalator

I got it into my head to try to model the escalator equivalent of a spiral staircase. This is about as close as I could get:

Got plenty more to do on this I think, detailing, materials, a second floor for people to go to, etc.

yo that’s pretty awesome. It hard to see the individual stairs though, a better lamp setup or a color ramp maybe?

Cool. I, actually didn’t have any trouble seeing the individual stairs, but instead had trouble seeing the people’s legs. How did you set up the animation to get the stairs to move and curve?

The small youtube size and high compression kind of worsen it, but one of the things I was thinking of was to change the stair material. I kind of like the idea of a red carpet escalator, but the bright red doesn’t compress very well.

The people models are artist’s pose dummies that I imported from an old copy of Poser. Sort of 3D stick figures. I used them to check the scale. In the future I want to replace them with animated walking realistic figures, but I’ve never done any character work yet.

  1. Created one step with the origin at the center of the circle.
  2. Added an IPO for rotation and set it to turn 360 degrees in about 30 seconds.
  3. Changed the animation frame to the various points where an individual step’s path changes (when it starts going up the stairs, when it levels out, etc.) and added keys to the position IPO.
  4. Duplicated the single step multiple times and changed each new step’s TimeOffset by enough to have it closely follow the one before.

I tried paths before that, but I continue to have a lot of problems getting them to repeat and follow at the correct pace.

cool - neat idea. I’ve gotta start learning how to animate…