Dancing Mech Modeling/Animation LDraw/POV-Ray Video Tutorial Series
This series of videos walks through the process of creating a dancing mech from start to finish. Note, I never finished so there is no final product, I'll explain below. Here are the anticipated steps:
- Show off the model (2007.03.16)
- "Digitize" a model with Bricksmith (LDraw) - Left Leg, Right Leg, and Torso (2007.03.16)
- Convert the model to POV-Ray (2007.03.17) using Anton Raves' POV-Ray converter
- Add a minifig (2007.03.30) using my minifig macro
- Build a scene (never finished)
- Use Bricksmith to create a keyframe file for POV-Ray and visualize the movements
- Add inverse kinetics so the mech limbs figure out their own rotations
- Render the final animation
The videos are from 40 to 60 minutes long and can be as big as 300 MB and are compressed with H264.
Please send me comments or questions or post them in this lugnet thread! I will put them in the "addendum" sections so that other users benefit.
What happened?
As of June 22nd, 2011, over 4 years has passed and I haven't done anything with this project.
What happened was that I had an idea of what I wanted the scene to look like, a military looking base with buildings. To make that scene, I ended up doing a lot of work and it never got finished.
But I kept working on the inverse kinetics. And then what happened there was that my laptop had a problem and it went off in the middle of some massive hard drive writes and it corrupted a lot of the files on the disk.
I think I recovered from that, but then the amount of IK possibilities were so many for my model. I thought I could cache the IK for the model in files, but I left the script calculating the possibilities running unattended for a day or few and when I checked it there were so many possibilities that the cache file filled the hard disk. That's when I kinda gave up. I still have the files but I honestly haven't looked at them since.
So what am I going to do about this project? I still want to finish it, but my priorities have changed, I'm not involved in the Lego CAD community anymore, and I've been using other software. So I don't know if I'll ever finish this or not.