Wintergatan is a Maker, a Youtuber and an experimental Musician who decided to share his passion with the community and decided to build this extraordinary musical instrument, a very complex Marble Machine, it is the second version he is building, a much more elaborate version 2.0 and that corrected the defects of the first version, which was mostly made of wood.
To build this machine, he used Design and Simulation with various existing Cad-Cam applications, he used the CNC milling, 3D printing and classic processing techniques used for making and in order to carry out the realization this dream is asking for help from the internet community, enjoying great success.
I share this example happened here on Blender Artists, because I hope Blender can soon become a useful tool for Makers like Wintergatan thanks to bridging the current gaps in precision modeling and CAD in general and expanding the simulation and animation of their projects.
the marble machine X is not yet complete, but in this video, its realization has reached such a point that it already shows all its fascinating potentials:
Wouldn’t it be neat if Blender’s simulation tools became expansive enough that you could run something like this in real time using Eevee?
Thanks for sharing this, there’s not a lot of people and companies these days that make such complex analog systems or are even capable of making them (such as the Wurlitzer). Everything now has be done with computer chips and code.
just to stay on the subject with marble machines and simulations, in 2002 this demo came out that ran in real time on the GPUs of those years …
Animusic’s “Pipe Dream” as one of only a few animations to demonstrate the RADEON 9700 graphic card’s ability.
Made by Animusic, a computer animation studio specializing in music-driven animation. Unlike many other music visualizations, the music drives the animation and not the other way around.
One of these days, you could insert maybe a dozen material cartridges in a massive 3D printer and get this entire thing to come out (no more CNC milling or figuring out where piece 1523 goes)
Add one more cartridge and it would print the marbles too, maybe a couple decades from now, or less if there’s a major R&D push in the area due to demand.
I was just thinking about a project like the one posted above, less mechanical and more electronic with the help of step motors and arduino … yes the work would be simplified a lot ^ ___ ^
Yes my friend I am aware of this guy’s work, I also saw the original wooden machine, truly great work! This is what inspired me to create my first music video:
Utter crap by comparison with Animusic, but everything up to where I am today flowed from his wonderful work. I hope one day to be able to re-create something like the Marble Machine in Blender where all the sounds are generated from the animation using my DAW & Sounds nodes and the animation is driven by my MIDI nodes from a MIDI file produced on my copy of Reason.
this series of videos, are making me understand how important it would be to have a good system of music and sound tracker well integrated to make some good simulations that go perfectly backwards and synchronized, also for simply testing simulation of mechanical devices
according to the blog of the blender devs, there are some interesting news that excite me in the potential of making this kind of projects. both to make simulations in blender, and to be able to physically design objects that can then be realized through Milling CNC or 3D Printing and are:
Better snapping and precision modeling
Physics & real-time mode (for designing simulation and baking)
Evetityng nodes
New projects
Based on the feedback in the previous roadmap article, there’s enough to do for 100s of developers on projects the coming years. That means we will have to prioritise. What’s possible to start working on in Q2 is:
Overrides and asset management
Better support for large scenes or complex environments
Modifier nodes
Physics & real-time mode (for designing simulation and baking)
Cycles: reviewing/adding patches
If the development fund grows beyond 30k:
Particles and hair nodes
Texturing tools and tools for procedural textures
Painting and Sculpting improvements
Better snapping and precision modeling
Cycles: denoising
Compositor
Priorities of new projects are still open and depend on Dev Fund member feedback and availability of developers. Let us know what you think, and don’t forget to join the Development Fund if you want to help out!
Note that there are numerous other projects running as well, thanks to Blender Institute, and thanks to volunteers and developers working for other companies. For example, work on Blender pipeline tools, work on the Video Sequencer, AMD openCL and Nvidia RTX rendering.
after the first implementation steps, certain needs would come spontaneously as makers begin to experiment …
blender could accept a lot of new potential users … now maybe they already use blender but not for this kind of use …
