The base rotates on the base bone’s Y axis. base‘s head is at the pivot for the upper arm. The base rotates on the pedestal, so the base bone is a child of the pedestal bone. But this bone never moves, so we locked everything – the location, rotation, and scale. Bones are posable – that’s the point, you can animate them. Our example’s first bone, pedestal, represents the robot’s pedestal, the part bolted to the floor. Blender has powerful tools to build rigs like this. So how about an extra bone that controls everything at once?Īn armature with all these extra control bones and constraints is called a rig. We usually curl our fingers all at once, and we curl all the joints on a finger at once. Far better to have an extra target bone that the character always looks at, and constrain the eyes to look at the target. Animating a character’s eyes by setting their angles would be awkward. The animator might not want to pose by positioning the bone. The dog can move freely to the limit of it’s leash. The rods on a steam locomotive stay on their pins. The front wheels of a passenger car steer together. Hinge joints only rotate, but some bones can scale (a soft robot), or translate (a CNC router). You probably can’t bend your knees backward. You can twist your wrist, but not your fingernails. ![]() Knees only swing back and forward, not side to side. If you move your femur (thigh bone), your shin goes with it.īones only rotate on certain axes. Your shin bone is a child of your thigh bone. Your shinbone’s tail is your knee, and your shinbone’s head is your ankle. Rest Poseīones pivot about the tail, and the head is ‘where they are’. The robot’s rest pose is the reference position of the joints, where the robot is when the axes are at zero. Import CAD files or build atop a photo or just measure the robot. Still, the armature does need to match the hardware size. For a robot, we don’t need the mesh, just the armature, because we’re not making a movie. Generally, computer animations consist of an armature and then the mesh for the body that hangs on it. Export the servo positions to your robot control program.Rig the armature so that it moves like your robot and is convenient to animate.Make a ‘skeleton’ (armature) that matches your robot.Here are the major steps to animating a robot: You want to focus on animation, and the Humane Rigging series is particularly recommended. We won’t teach you Blender here, because there are thousands of great Blender tutorials online. It still definitely is a large program, with 23 different editors and literally thousands of controls, but we’ll only be using a small subset to make our robot move. The good news is that, with revision 2.9, it moved to a much more normal interface. Now, Blender is notorious for a difficult user interface. We’ll be animating it first in Blender and then translating the file over to something we can use to drive the servos with a little script. It has a non-moving pedestal, rotating base, upper arm, and lower arm. ![]() We made a sample project, a 3-axis robot arm to illustrate. ![]() Making robot motion with Blender is, if not easy, at least tolerable. It’s all about creating smooth motion for animations and computer graphics. And then you realize that the bear has 34 more servos.įortunately for everybody who’s done the above, there’s Blender. After half an hour of fiddling with the numbers, the bear is gracefully raising it’s arm like a one armed zombie. You could work through all the math yourself. ![]() What you need is an animation, and preferably with smooth acceleration. If you simply set a servo position, the motor will slew into place as fast as it can. Imagine that you decide the dancing bear should raise it’s arm. You’ve built a robot crammed full of servos and now you settle down for the fun part, programming your new dancing animatronic bear! The pain in your life is just beginning.
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