Robotic Arm

Help! I am doing an animation about a robotic arm in a factory. I went into blender, tried making one, and boom. I can’t figure it out. Can anyone help me with how to make one, or point me to a tutorial about how to make one? Thanks.

Probably a bit simpler than this.
http://www.botmag.com/issue2/images/bottom2.jpg

You must think that object to a multiple smaller objects. I mean, this is not a 1 big thing, it is a group where is many of the objects.

You can see the flat pill shaped orange panel there with text www.lynxmotion.com or something like that. Its pretty easy to model, so you can begin from it. Then you can see which objects are connected with your 2 panels in the picture?

Those 2 metallic barbells, so you can create them and then star modelling somethin else which is connected them.

Its lot of more easy if you learn to see your models in the smaller parts of the bigger project.

Hope this helped a bit.

Thanks. I did some experimenting, didn’t turn out too well. part of it is my mediocre modelling skills.

That’s a pretty broad question. You’ll need to specify what, specifically you need help with.

Modeling? (creating the geometry of your arm) Texturing? (Applying materials and images to your model) Rigging (setting up your arm so it can be easily animated?) There’s a ton of great documentation online, too – don’t get discouraged, and keep looking!

I mainly want modelling, but rigging would be nice too.

Hahahaha…Interesting, take a look at the screenshot attached. I’m currently working on this. I didn’t do any modeling tutorials on it though. Perhaps I should…

I did do 3 video tutorials on rigging the thing though. Right now, I’m working on hoses/electrical cables between the parts that make up the arm, and I’m rigging them so they move automatically while animating the thing. And an animation is eventually planned for this.

It’d be a week or two before I could do a modelling tutorial on this thing… I will eventually be releasing this model - untextured though - to the community, but that’s a month or two away, and the model I let go for free won’t have the cables/hoses either, as it’s pretty complex and a bit of work…

It really wasn’t hard to model, if you have basic/intermediate modelling skills, it’s pretty simple. I don’t want to stop my progress on the hoses/cables to make a tutorial on modelling, kinda have a deadline to meet… I might be able to share screenshots of the parts and answer questions if you don’t want to wait till I get around to other tutorials…

Lemme know if that would help,
Randy

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Poofo, you’re probably not going to find a “how to model a robotic arm” tutorial because that’s a pretty specific thing. Have you read over the Noob-To-Pro ebook? There’s some good stuff in there, even if some of it is slightly dated. Assuming you want to stick close to the look of the arm in your reference image, it looks like most parts of the arm are made from flat pieces of plastic. In that case, you can pretty much create the outline/silhouette of each part (by extruding vertices, in Edit Mode), extrude it a bit, and cap the flat parts. Most of the parts have at least bilateral symmetry, so you could probably save some time by making judicious use of the Mirror modifier. You can probably google any of the terms I’ve mentioned here to find specific details. One of the older BlenderArtmagazines, available in PDF, also had a good section on rigging a backhoe excavator arm that might be relevant. It mentions some details like “put the object’s center at the point around which you want it to rotate” – in this case, the joint axis for each segment of the arm. Lots of other good advice, and general tips, in BlenderArt.

Good luck!

Thanks! Just what do I extrude though?

Here is also my creature of this kind of scene. I did it few moths ago, but never completed it…

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5904620/tehdas.jpg

Heres a basic model I made. Do you think this is a good basis?
p.s. I never want to hear the words subdivide or extrude again…

http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/9835/earlytest.png

If you can animate it as you want to, it would be just nice. :slight_smile:

You need more patience than that… subdivide and extrude are your friends;) the two most important modeling tools you have at your disposal. Another good thing when doing mechanical modelling is the “snap to grid” feature (during edit mode press shift+s => selection to grid). Also if you hold ctrl or shift+ctrl when extruding/moving/rotating it automatically uses 1 or 1/10 of a grid step increments.

Thanks for the tips! yeah, I know I’m going to be using the words subdivide and extrude again… A lot actually.