Make mechanical rigs without bones in Blender!

hey this is Daniel in this video I'm going to show you how to make this mechanically moving arm it is easily animatable it moves dynamically and the pisses move accurately the techniques in this video can be used for all kinds of things from robots to tractors desk lamps to what I'll be copying in this video which is my microphone holding arm so let's start by making some basic arm support pieces so type shift a go to mesh and Cube tab to edit mode s to scale it down and then SZ to scale it up on the z-axis the these items do need be pretty narrow and very tall so let's do it like that awesome let's go to object mode so we can see those edges a little better and if you want this to look really nice later on let's add a very slight bevel so very low level I'll add three three segments to it and yeah because in the real world very few things are completely sharp edged right unless it's a knife so I'm going to round those edges so I'm going to move this down and then alt D to move this right there so the exact copy if I edit and do anything to this it's going to happen to this one over here as far as modeling now let's make the joint piece that goes in the middle so shift a add another Cube gz to move it up here oh let's turn off our snapping we don't need that right now tab in edit mode SX to make it very thin let's make sure we're on the individual Origins not that 3D cursor so we can actually move things a little bit easier model things a little bit easier U now I'm in edit mode and I'm going to move everything I've just made off the origin point so the origin point is still in the middle uh this is good because we we can add a modifier uh a mirror modifier there we go so now we only have to model one part and blender does the rest for us you will learn very quickly I am very lazy and I like to do things efficiently move this up there's going to be screws here for the joints and let's move this back piece up like so okay we can grab these short edges which is I'm in Edge select mode and hold shift to select multiple edges grab this one down there and that one down there and now we can do contrl B for bevel around these edges awesome let's make some screws real easy uh first I'm going to put my cursor right here so shift s and cursor to select it let just put your 3D cursor whatever to whatever you have selected and then we can add objects and it'll be right there so we don't have to scroll around and we don't lose stuff R y90 let's scale it down and GX move it out a little bit okay I'm going to press number three to get a flat side view and let's put it where it needs to be in order to go through into the arm yep right there uh we haven't uh shaded smoothed anything we going to select this piece W Auto shade smooth Auto shade smooth and auto shade smooth cool now let's turn this cylinder here oh let's go back to face select let's turn the cylinder into a screw so I'm looking at mine it's literally right in front of my face so this should be no excuse for it to not look good um e and let's shrink this down and now a Bolt's going to go right here so I'm going to make another cylinder but I'm going to before I size it down give it six sides okay now we can s and scale it down real small R oh R y90 there we go I always mix up my directions now there's actually a little Taurus like a little doughnut right here which is a real soft little round things let's see if I can fake it by using inset on this cylinder extruding it out to pop out yep I inset there and there now I'm going to grab these start up edges I'm holding alt and I'm selecting an edge and it gets the whole Edge loop I can do it here or here you just got to be real careful where you click now contrl B to Bevel these yes awesome and this has basically the tip of the screw sticking out I'll just leave it right there there that looks pretty good yeah good enough for me oh I need to Bevel this hex nut here so just uh select any of these faces press L and grabs all the linked faces contrl B let's just do like three faces yeah that looks great and then shade smooth nice now we only have to make that one time and we can duplicate this all over the place it's awesome before we do that let's make a texture let's call it bolt or nut I don't know they're the same they're all silver shiny so three for side view now here's the trick to make duplicates of this without having to make them over and over it's alt D and then type in an axis we can slide it then grab both of these alt DZ move it up here this one needs to go up higher awesome just like that and then we can also copy these over to The Other Side by uh basically setting our 3D cursor in the middle here so shift s cursor sorry shift s cursor is selected so the cursor is in the middle grab all these bolts and we're going to copy them to the flip side so alt D enter change your origin back to 3D cursor and scale them on the X but ne1 so we just scaled it based on the 3D cursor negative 1 popped them over here now I I do think that messes up the normals when you do that inverted scale but uh I don't think it's going to be noticeable for what we're doing here um so cool now let's grab these arms and move some up here we're going to connect them up to these arms up here so shift e and I still have my 3D cursor selected so I can actually just rotate them up like this - 45 and then another 90ga 90 there we go so we get a nice um 90° or 45 degree angle let's put them in place right there and then this one can be back right right there now these are all going to move mechanically with each other like you would expect and we're even going to add some little Pistons here which could be Springs or Hydraulics if you're making something you know heavy duty that's actually like motorized let's copy this brace here and the bolts so I'm just going to box select everything and then deselect these arms which I don't want so now I have that joint plate and the screws let's shift d and move it up here and I'm not sure what kind of angle I'm going to put these at go back to to M medium point so we can rotate them all together maybe like this and we can you know somehow the mic would be connected to here I'm not really going I'm not going to make a microphone um but yeah let's just do that trying to line up the arms with the bolts okay that's good enough for our purposes and um let's make a little bit of a base alt DZ and I'm going to rotate it basically just upside down yeah cool and then um just going to delete these bolts down here and we could make like a base of some kind just so there's something down there now let's talk about these moving arm pieces the origin of anything that moves is really important so we need to have the origin of each of these arms basically where the joint is so let's zoom in down here and um we're going to set an origin point where this screw is and then that screw and then we're going to change the origin of each of these arms to be those locations so select a screw shift s and on the bottom cursor is selected okay now select your arm W go to set origin and origined 3D cursor there we go oh look what's happening it's because I alt DED all these earlier they're all messed up so let's just delete these arms we'll put them back later okay but hey this actually is not bad because we got the origin Point fixed now just shift d oh let's make a material real quick call it arm it's probably going to be a black metal lator just make it black there we go okay okay so with this thing selected let's just shift d and move it right over to be right there awesome and then because we had to delete our once earlier because I messed up let's Shifty those rotate them- 45 there we go try your best to line it up to that screw it doesn't ultimately matter it's not going to affect the mechanics but it makes things more realistic awesome all right cool so now if something rotates look it rotates where it should now speaking of which let's Li these rotations to only being the right rotation so from a side view it's only going to rotate one axis which is X everything is moving on the x- axis so we can actually lock the Y and Z in the object properties click on that little lock click on the lock cck on the lock and lock it awesome so now if we select it and just press R even r r which normally freely rotates stuff it can only rotate on one axis and that's awesome has to be right in the middle let's grab both of these bolts here's a good trick when you have two objects you can set the 3D cursor right in the middle of them two so shift s there we go right in the middle of the two I should have said and it's like a medium point so let's fix this origin W origin 2 3D cursor yep nothing changed with the mirror but the origin is where it needs to be we're also going to create an empty we're going to be using some empties here let's just make spheres because they're easy to scale and grab and we're going to parent the uh empty to the rod so grab the empty first and then the rod and press contrl P for parent so we're just going to use that first option there awesome so you know if this Rod moves or when it moves the empty stays with it now we want to lock this um this joint piece to the location of that empty so go to constraints this is where the magic is I do not like bones I hate armatures I hate rigging um so I'm basically finding a bunch of work grounds so we're going to copy location of what of that empty I'm in a side view oh I need to fix the base there oopsie that's what happens when you move Origins around things things move around so if I grab this arm and just press R look that joint piece is is copying the location of that sphere empty and it is not moving there which is great I like that now let's do the same thing with this but we're actually going to make this copy the rotation of this so the inside arms are going to be the main ones if you want to move something pose it or animate it we're only going to be selecting the inside arms the top one's we can actually make them non-selectable so we don't accidentally do that but first we need to set up the constraint so add constraint copy rotation of what of that guy so oh yeah look at that boom they're dancing we can also limit the rotation to like not go any further than this with another constraint um that is uh limit limit rotation right there but I'm not going to do that right now uh we're we're actually doing pretty good here now we need to parent these guys to this because wherever that joint moves in the middle this thing we want the arms to stay with it just like that oh the bolts the bolts are not staying with it I can see in my outliner these first eight cylinders I think are the ones yep the first yeah first eight here from cylinder to cylinder 7 those are the first ones I made so I'm going to parent them to this contrl P awesome all right so it's working I like it now let's grab this outer arm that we don't ever want to accidentally grab and just turn off selectable if you don't have the arrow there go to your filter options and turn on the selectable switch you can turn it on or off so now look I cannot click on it I can't do it and that's good I don't want to accidentally do that it's right here I can select it over here but not in the viewport now let's copy this rotation from this one cool and then let's do that same empty thing again so shift a add a sphere empty and this uh sphere is going to be parented to this guy so it moves with the end of the arm and then this is going to copy the location of this but we need to fix the origin to be right in the middle remember I grabbed those two bolts I grabbed these two bolts which allows me to put the 3D cursor right in the middle perfectly and then we're going to fix the origin of this uh by doing W set origin to 3D cursor there we go now earlier I did altd and Shifty for this one this is a Shifty which means if I edit this it's totally different this one has a different origin than this one so um yeah if you followed me earlier you should have done that correctly which is a shift d not an altd which allows these to have different unique Origins anyway we got the origin fixed for this guy and we're going to basically do that copy location now so go to constraints copy location of what of the sphere now as this moves yep we got to get the bolts now let's see which bolts are they starts with cylinder 8 up to what 16 oh minus one of those I use control and double click it deselects it over in the outliner so yes I got all the bolts and then shift select the top joint plate and parent them with contrl P awesome oh yeah I like that now we can animate this and tell it to do whatever we want um now let's put some some cylinders on here that could be pneumatic Pistons or Hydraulics they could also be Springs you know for something like this so let's go with pneumatic Pistons cuz then that's going to be more popular more people are going to be adding pistons and hydraulics to things than you know spring tension arms so let's um go down here and make a little piston so shift a first we're going to make the joint let's put our sides to 32 remember I made the bolt earlier that's why it was at six right there and a w shade smooth and let's move it out here a little bit let's tab in edit mode rotate it 90° okay we going to make this a little bit smaller smaller this is going to be basically the joint the Piston is going to be connected to now you can add as much detail as you want with hard surface modeling screwed along normals there I don't want to focus on that too much in this video because that would make it really long and if you're probably just here to learn the mechanics and the moving parts so let's put our origin point right in the middle of these faces by the way I held alt and selected one of them and it grabbed the whole Edge Loop so shift s curer is selected I'm using that a lot in this video and cylinder there we go now this is going to be the I think it's called the main cylinder which is the big one SZ let's move it up a little bit here we go and then the small cylinder is going to be inside here another little touch of realism let's make a little lip so I press pressed e and enter say I have this whole I have this extruded face that I can now make a different scale and then e there we go so that is The Edge this looks like a Mario a Mario pipe right and then we're going to add another cylinder which is a separate object this is important so this is one object down here with an origin point that is perfectly in the middle of the circular circularly pieced down here which means it will you know rotate perfectly around its origin that's part of the mechanics we're going to do in a second with constraints and we need a top cylinder as a separate object so shift a make another cylinder size it down with scale there we go awesome okay and similarly we want to have a little joint up here so I'm going to make a cylinder rotate it sideways there we go oh shade smooth awesome all right we have our piston but one thing's wrong with this top piece the origin point is not in the right place so how do we fix that well I already have the 3D cursor where I needed to be I just need to set my origin point to that spot which I've been doing a lot so let's do that one more time in case you missed it I'm going to select something that does perfectly around where the joint origin needs to be shift s cursor is selected all right it's right in the middle now get out of edit mode with Tab and with your object selected W and set origin to 3D cursor there it is now the orange dot is right in the middle and when I rotate it it moves the way it should which is what x yes everything's on X so let's lock the Y and Z again lock Y and Z so that things can only rotate like that great now we're ready to start putting things in place so let's decide where these things need to be for them to move accurately they need to actually work how things really work in the real world so I'm going to put these right there and this top joint is actually going to connect to the top arm right so that as they move the space between the two contracts and the Piston can actually move them you could also put this right here but then the movement is limited um so I'm going to put this right here not good leverage but it'll work now we need to make these face each other and we need to parent them so that they stick with these arms so first let's do the um directional constraint trick so go to constraint do damped track and select what it needs to point to okay we're we're pointing at a Target you can even see a line there see that blue line that means it's tracking this so anywhere I move this it points pretty sweet but it's in the wrong orientation so let's try some different orientations here till we get it there it is negative Z worked for this one awesome so it's pointing down soever this moves it'll always be there and now we need to do the same thing to this however I found that there is a bit of a glitch in blender where if I make this constraint looking at this and this is looking at this you're looking at each other it'll start freaking out and flickering so let's put an empty right here so shift s part a 3D cursor there shift a empty let's do another sphere all right now this is what this sphere right here is what this bottom cylinder is going to point to so damped track select the sphere and I think it was negative Z positive Z there it is awesome so look at that all right next we need to parent the bottom cylinder to the base so select the cylinder first and then the Bas contrl P object and we need to connect this one or parent it to this arm so select the top cylinder select the arm crl P object now let's see if it works oh I forgot to parent the sphere to the arm as well because remember the sphere is the sphere empty is where the bottom cylinder is pointing to at all times so now yes it works I love it now let's make the top cylinder a little bit longer so that we can accommodate movement like this so tab into edit mode grab that pH control+ plus to grab the little lip that we made there and let's move it along the normals so let's go to normals there we go now we can perfectly just stretch it out to meet where it needs to be like at a maximum length and let's test it all the way in all the way out yeah cool that makes me happy now this is not completely accurate we should probably you know make a little joint there awesome and by the way this cylinder is so overpowered for this tiny desk uh mic stand this is just like ridiculous amount of power um we can make another and we can really just copy and paste this which is a really cool thing about this and I think I'm going to make an asset pack of just pistons and cylinders that you guys can drop into your robots and mechanical stuff and it'll be supery and quick so let's do a copy and paste from a side view shift d and let's place this right here and we need to reparent things so this needs to be parented to this arm now there and then this and this need to be parented to this arm contrl P we can do multiple at once now we need to move them into place so just drag them where they need to where you want them to connect whether it's here or here awesome Let's test it out yes and you definitely want to limit rotation um so this doesn't happen so yeah let's do that so let's see where does it hit where where do we have problems we have problems around 80 degrees and up to 8 degrees is good so let's do a constraint limit rotation along the which axis the X minimum was 8 maximum was 80 I believe believe oh yeah now it will not go I can move it but it stops right at 80 ah that makes me happy you may me thinking this is so much more work than bones and you know I I can't really disagree with you because I don't have any experience in Bones because when I every time I try to do them I hate them and it's just so annoying let's do this limitation so oh we got to look at our Rotation Numbers minimum is are we going down we're going up we're going down we're in the negatives so minimum -66 maximum I'll say positive 54 okay constraint limit rotation X minimum 66 maximum positive 54 and awesome you can also press alt R to reset all the rotations or in this case you know just X really to zero so zero and then what do this yeah that one's zero now now what about Springs there is a way to make an object stretch from point A which is the base to point B which could be a Target empty um that would be useful for spring so let's make a spring setup here uh there actually is a way to make Springs and blender using the curves so shift a it's in curves and curve Spirals and then archimedian all right so now we can do turn's going to have to be a lot because we're going to make this thing you know a pretty tight wound spring let's put our height down somewhere around there our uh turns are let's see 80 radius doit needs to be smaller around there does that look about right maybe a few more few more turns let's double it 160 and half the height so from 0.05 yeah there we go so it's nice and tight all right Tab out of edit mode Let's go to the curve settings give it some thickness some depth I'm holding shift while I turn this up by the way there we go and the origin point is it at the bottom it is great that's what we want so let's parent this to the arm contrl P okay and then we're going to make this point towards an empty I'm just going to copy this empty it's already parented to the right arm so just move it right there and we're going to use this as the um I don't know what to call it like the stretch Target for the spring so select your spring in constraints go to stretch two and we're going to select the sphere now the weird thing is meshes when using this constraint have to be going along the Y AIS so I'm going to turn off the constraint I should have done this earlier ear but now you know tab in edit mode and we need to rotate this 90° I have my 3D cursor already at the bottom so r90 there we go and now when you turn this on yes it's stretching so let's see as we move this what happens as yep look at that it's stretching far and stretching near that's great it's not quite reaching though so we need to make it a little taller let's turn this off and uh again from our 3D cursor which is at the origin right here at the base we can just s y stretch it a little bit it right there turn it on yeah that looks good and to cover this weirdness up we can make a little joint or you know some kind of like cylinder thing that it's connected to like that I don't know that's terrible modeling but yeah you get the point I think you can make a little loop with that top curve right this is still a curve object which is cool so we could just like have it you know Loop up around or whatever that's something for another tutorial um and yeah so now we've got a piston working against a spring arm now when you want to pose these things you have to be in individual origin mode so that the origin which is the base of the joint will be where the pivoting is if you're in like 3D cursor look my 3D cursor is right here this happens it's shifting out of socket so be careful that is the only downside to using this method versus uh versus bones oh we didn't parent this little joint doohickey contrl P there we go all right cool so we got moving Pistons we got stretching Springs looks great also notice the base of the spring is not where it needs to be but that's kind of cool because look it actually will just stretch anywhere anywhere to that Oro point oh also one the weird thing about the stretch um stretch du constraint is that look it makes it like get fatter look at that that's crazy so to change that uh we need to go and turn off volume variation I don't know why it calls that volume should be like scale but yeah now the scale will not be changing awesome and that's how you do it hope you enjoyed the video if you have any questions ask down below and I'd love to see what you guys make with this technique have fun and look forward to a really cool asset pack coming soon of pistons and cylinders thanks for watching have a great week

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 1,159

Keywords: blender, rigging, bones, mechanical animation, robot, animation

Id: Zd0nIlfRgsU

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024