Blender Tutorial - Theo Jansen Mechanism 3D Animation

More Updates: I found the .blend file! My hard drive got wiped out but it was on the backup disk. Scroll down for the link. This was blender 2.45 I think. Some of the keys have changed and I expect they will continue to change. There is also a better way "to use a bone as an IK target (without creating an empty), select the target bone first, then hold down SHIFT and select the bone at the tip of your IK chain. Pressing CTRL+I and choosing "To Selected Bone" from the popup menu sets the tip bone to use the target bone for its IK target. Note that the target bone cannot be a part of the bone chain that will have IK."
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-240/inverse-kinematics/


Thanks, Theo Jansen, for the inspiration and the wonderful kinetic sculptures:
http://strandbeest.com
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=theo+jansen

We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

Thanks, dwyllie, for modelling the mechanism in Geometer's Sketchpad. I used a screen capture of his video as a template: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CufN43By79s

I used this linkage for my wheel-less bicycle animation, http://youtube.com/watch?v=JoQj-tobYOw
and this no-wheels skateboard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRCwhQDzuJA

My website:
http://thenerdshow.com

Blender is a free 3D animation creation program you can download from http://blender.org

The oft requested .blend file:
http://www.thenerdshow.com/blender/walker.7z

This video is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. In short: you are free to share and make derivatives of this work under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

This video contains parts or visuals of a free software program. You may use it freely according to its particular license:
Blender (http://www.blender.org) is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Theo Jansen's aesthetically pleasing kinetic sculptures can be found at http://strandbeest.com and on YouTube. Just search for Theo Jansen. According to a news article I read (http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/article/13685/Walking-structures-are-no-pipe-dr­eam.aspx) He has elected not to patent these inventions, which makes him a hero to me. All he asks if you are interested in them is that you purchase his book available on his web site. (http://www.strandbeest.com)

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• blender
• tutorial
• complex
• linkage
• art
• animation
• design
• theo
• jansen
• kinetic
• sculpture
• inverse
• kinematics
• ik
• chain
• leg
• robotics
• wheel

[OregonDARRYL]

Can you simply copy what you just did and flip it horizontally to make the other half of the mechanism?

[themanyone]

@OregonDARRYL yes you can :)

[OregonDARRYL]

@themanyone Hey, thanks. I downloaded Blender a while ago, but it looked so damned complicated... I think I'll give it a shot.... looks like an incredible program.

[themanyone]

@OregonDARRYL Yeah there is not much it can't do now and what those things are I wouldn't know how to explain. Not bad at all for the price!

[casandramar]

hey what the heck version of blender are you useing ctrl and p ...... shift p you also got a lot of things wrong to i don't know how yours even works? it needed a lot of modification to make it work on mine ..... and we're useing the same version !

[themanyone]

That was version 2.45 for Linux, I think. They are changing this a lot. I may redo it when they get 3.0 stable enough.

[Asdam12]

Blender is FREE, and it's AWESOME!! 3DS Max costs a crapload of money(although it's probably awesome too)...

[tonyeddie]

Great tutorial! Did you fart at 5:07? XD

Still learned alot from it though.

[goku1550]

i cant understand



[michael18276]

now that's really fast modeling

[drummerdean2]

Very cool!! I know this is a pretty old video, but I'll try anyway. I'm new to Blender and I'm working on a model of a front end loader. The bucket needs to both raise and then tilt to dump. I have the raise and tilt basically in good shape, BUT, I can't seem to get the two arm tips of the armatures at the point (similar to where you put your "c1") to connect. I've tried everything I can find, but the points just won't stay together. Does this make any sense? Any thoughts if it does?

[debrisofmysoul]

dude my techer awarded me 200 hundred dollars for showing him this be cuase we run a robotics/ engineering/ desgining program (yes i help run it ) class and this helped ous all out becouse cads all though more effective for what we need it is expensive and blender is not this helped prove that its not as hard as it seems (WOW thats was a mouth full)

[civilisationskerl]

5:06 pooooop