This is a render I made of a wind-up mechanical box that cycles a game of chess across its top.
I had been wanting to model a full chess set in Blender for a while, but couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with it until this idea popped into my head. Modeling the wooden carving was a fun twist to the project. It was also challenging to figure out the best way to get the pieces to move across the board as the board moved under them.
This was created in Blender 4.4 and rendered in Cycles with Optix. All the materials in the scene are procedural. I pulled and mixed the sound effects from various libraries I’ve purchased and edited the video in Adobe Premiere.
Here’s a picture of the chess set itself, and a still from the animation:
Even though I’m a visual artist at heart, I like flexing my sound production abilities… and it really makes a big difference, so I need to just dig in and do it more, I think.
A lot of the piece movements are in service of keeping the action going down the board, but I liked that I was able to get in a few pretty good takes with the queen - even if IRL I would’ve taken her with the knight in a heartbeat.
