Machine & Piston | Let's Build It In Blender

let's build it so since you guys wanted a robot arm i figured i would model it after fisto our in-house robotic fist-bumping machine oh yeah i'm missing the best part this doe provides the best fist bumps around or beatdowns it's the user's discretion really well to rig this guy we're going to need to add some bones i don't want to fight for visibility of the bones either so i'll make sure in front is checked on and i'm also going to turn on the axes so i know the bone rotation i'll just rotate this bone to align its local rotation with the global rotation so that we aren't getting any funky stuff either when we want to rotate this bone in posing finally i'll call it root since i want it to be the parent bone of every bone that's to come afterwards now in edit mode i'll duplicate this bone and use it for the arm 01 mesh i'm going to position my cursor at the ends of each side to be able to snap the head and tail of my bone to them this is just a quick way to help me position the bone next i'll extrude a new bone from the tail of the arm 01 bone and snap it to fit the arm o2 mesh now we can see how this parent relationship is going to work when i rotate the bottom arm the top one will move with it we can also move the top one independently however there is no relationship right now with our root bone so to fix that i will select our child bone first then the parent bone and hit control p keep offset because i don't want the bones to snap or connect together so now when we move the root everything is going to come with it now octahedral is feeling a little clunky to me right now so i'll change the display type to be stick to develop the first half of our piston i'll duplicate the top bone and position it exactly like we've been doing so far switching the transform orientation to normal i'm going to want to position the tail of the bone much closer to the head because we're going to be using constraints later on that rely on the tail position next i'll build the bottom piston bone the exact same way but we don't need to worry about moving the tail i'll also add a second bone in the same position as this one and i'll call it target which i'm going to want to bring down to about halfway checking parental relations we can see that these bones were naughty children and therefore inherited nothing so by selecting them both first and then our arm bone last i'll hit ctrl p keep offset again now everything should work as intended so now that we have our skeleton developed we need to actually add some skin to these bones which i'm now realizing may be why they call it skinning there's several ways that we can go about doing this however since this is a simple rig i'm just going to bind everything a hundred percent to each bone i'll first select the mesh in object mode and shift select the rig itself i'll then go into pose mode select the bone i wish to attach to and hit control p bone this will just attach my mesh selection to that bone at 100 percent influence from here it's a matter of figuring out which bone you want to control which mesh since the process is exactly the same i'll parent the arms to the appropriate bones as well as parenting the pistons to the two piston bones don't use the targa bone yet though because we're going to use that in a minute now when we go ahead and pose our bones you can see it's starting to move our robot pretty sick right well we've got some hiccups with our pistons which we're going to be able to solve by using constraints yes constraints are spooky but broken pistons are spookier so let's fix it we'll start with the top piston there are several ways we could do this with two ways in particular that i'm going to show you the first way is by using a damped track constraint we need to select a target being our rig and then a specific bone which it will look at this is where we will use the target bone i've made sure to set it to the y direction which the local bone rotation is pointed towards now the top piston will face the target regardless of its position or parent rotation now an issue with using damp track is that we may be able to run out of piston or even pop the piston out the other side of the mesh so another constraint we could use in its place is the stretch ii constraint instead this will stretch and distort the mesh within the confines of its bone and the target bone now if this piston is textured take note that this will stretch those textures otherwise it is a pretty handy constraint that takes care of those clipping issues for us i'll make sure to check on volume min to reduce the stretch distortion and that's about our top piston done for the bottom piston i don't want it to actually stretch itself towards the top piece so i'm fine to use a damp track constraint i'll just target the top bone there and pretty easily we've got ourselves not only a working piston but a pretty capable rig now fk systems are neat but ik systems are for the cool kids i'll extrude a new bone out from the top arm and clear the parenting with alt p i'll call this bone ik controller and this will control our entire rig i'll make sure to make the controller a child of the root bone however as i want it to be able to rotate as a unit on our top arm bone i'll add an inverse kinematics constraint with our rig as the target and the ik controller as the bone now if i move our controller you can see that it just works to stop the entire rig from moving i will need to increase the chain length to fit the desired number of bones i want to affect in this case it will just be two bones as i only want to move the top and the bottom arms but not the root bone now we're almost done but i want to make sure that i can also move the ik controller freely without causing weird issues or unrealistic positioning which we can see is currently very easy to do for the ik controller i'll add a limit location constraint which well that's exactly as the name suggests moving the controller on the positive zed in local space i can see that i may only want to go around about one-ish meter switching from global space to local space i'll then provide the maximum z value on the right bottom a value of one meter now as i move in the positive z direction i'm no longer able to move farther than one meter however our internal transformation in our n panel still updates for the movement which in some cases may not be desirable to turn that off all we need to do is check on the for transform button and we can stop those transforms dead in their tracks for the local x direction i want there to be no movement whatsoever this one is easy enough i'll select both the max and min values and leave them at zero alternatively we could lock the x-axis in the end panel but i'd rather keep all constraints in one place if we look at the y direction there is the issue of our piston flying back into our mesh where realistically we would not be able to rotate to that extreme i found something around a max of 1.5 meters and a minimum of around negative 0.2 meters to be appropriate finally a minimum of negative 2 meters for the z direction seems to work just fine and with that i'd say we have a pretty spitting image of old fisto here well let me know how i did down in the comments thanks to everybody that voted on this video and make sure to cast your vote on our community tab for the next creation i make if you're feeling charitable make sure to leave a like and if you like this kind of blender content make sure to subscribe i've been chunk this has been let's build it in blender later skater what kind of machines do you find in the arctic snowbots duh how do how do robots eat guacamole with microchips why did the robot marry his wife couldn't resist her

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 123,501

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender 2.8, blender how to, lets build it in blender, piston, machine, rig, arm, robotic, robot

Id: sPiVoH4Z5uI

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020