Hey there, I thought I’d show my work. It’s my first rigging, first animation and first camera tracking - I’m pretty much a blender newbie:
All with much help from a number of people on IRC, Olson & sst66 being the stand-outs.
I could do much more to this but I can’t justify more time on this particular project. It’s more of a proof of concept for the animation technique than anything else, though the robotic gripper is real research and the researcher may well use the final animation.
Obviously the CG’d part you’re looking at is the robotic gripper thingy on my desk in the video. If you watch in HD and look very closely you can see the little guide wheels turning. The worm drive if that’s what you call it also turns but you can’t discern that from the video. I used a script to increase the numbers on the text object on the force sensor device as the gripper applies force to lift the blocks which helps the viewer to visualise the how and why. The animation was rendered with cycles at around 35-50 seconds per frame on the Quadro 4000. That’s my work computer, for home I have an EVGA GTX 580 Classified Ultra on its way so I can do some more hobby 3D work and actually learn modelling properly.
The intro was done in Adobe After Effects whilst the remainder was mostly blender with Premiere just laying down the tracks and transitions.