A quick test playblast of a mechanical iris diaphragm.
Designing a robot for a class, and wanted to use an iris style shutter lens for the eyes. After a bit of research, well... after figuring out what to call such so I could do the research, managed to put together a relatively quick example piece. Works fairly well, though it seems a bit thicker than I'd like. Shall try updating a newer version later with thinner, but more numerous blades, and see if that can't be corrected so it looks better. It's far too thick as is to use for its' intended purpose just yet.
Also, since it was such a pain to find information on how to do this, I'll give a quick description of how I made it in case anyone else has future issues with this:
1: Create a basic polygon shape, specifically, a PIPE
2: For a simple 6 blade iris, set subdivision axis to 12 as it divides easily
3: Delete 7 of the 12 sides, leaving 5 faces on top/bottom; fill the hole on the end that was just made. If more than 5 faces (for this 6blade version) it'll clip by rotating outside the desired range.
4: Set the pivot to the outside corner; adjust the height to 0.02
5: Move the blade down; repeat process. You could duplicate it, but then it gets to be a mess to line them up properly. To be mechanically precise, it was just easier to make a new one which doesn't take long.
6: Each new blade (6 blades total) vertex snap Y-axis to the last one, so they stack on top of each other without overlap
7: Do a quick test; if this worked right, select all 6 blades and rotate in Y axis; should cause them to open and shut properly. With this design, they can close to about -20 degrees, and still look correct. Past that and it starts looking weird. The range of rotateY is 0 to -20
8: The outer cover's made exactly the same way, except without deleting faces; instead just set to 0.02 height, and scale it up to 1.05 for X / Y / Z; this allows a top cover (duplicate for the bottom) that will hide the blades until they close.
9: As there's 6 blades, and a gap between the top and bottom covers, but we know each blade is 0.02 in height... create yet another pipe, this time set height to 0.12 (0.02 * 6), and set it to 1.04 scaling, so there's a lip. Vertex snap in Y to fit in between the others as a sandwich. This makes an outer layer so the blades can't be seen from the sides until they close properly. Oh, and set the thickness to 0.02 as well or it'll stick through the inside and look bad.
10: Standard animation and cleanup with graph editor. Personally suggest cleanup in outliner as well for naming and grouping or it'll turn into a mess later on when exported to a larger project.
This took way more research than expected, and eventually I figured it out from just a few photographs someone had taken of an actual mechanical one they were building from scratch. As it was such an absolute royal pain (and I never did find anything) to locate a tutorial on this, hopefully this description helps someone else in the future!
3DSmax and other 3d packages should be fairly similar all things considered, despite that this was made on Maya.
Loading...
0:31
Iris Diaphram Prototypeby kurtschaefer21,467 views
wow.i i wish i can get the scene file, before i read your tutorial.
riphoff 1 year ago