Ritcher's Anchor Stone & Marble run Short Animation.

Hello fellow friends,

Whilst i take a break from the other lil project (the piston steam engine thingy....), I thought to take up the BIG project that I always wanted to do. It would be so cool, and fun, and entertaining, to create, animate, and finally to watch a Marble Run event.

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Eg: Typical Marble Run contraption


This involves a ball to follow the course of the contraptions and machines and such. All of which will be animated via Physics side of Blender. The mapping of the course, have not been designed... yet. But meanwhile, I start creating objects for the short animated film.

I wanted to have the "toy" feel, and I figured Ritcher's Anchor Stone Toy blocks would be ideal.

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Eg: One of many standard Ritcher's Anchor Stone kits

Of course, when each object is modelled, i would then "block" build structures to create buildings, and ramps, and so forth.  Here's a quick example i made in Blender using simple geometric shapes and build together as Buildings.

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217 objects 5964 vertices. Took a bit to render on lowest possible render setting in Cycles

Problem with this, is when Beveling each object, the vertices count is so high, considering when placing 1000's of blocks together (I estimated to be around 1million, divided into a series of short-short animated clips, which later combined to make a short film). Now this poor and well used Alienware laptop of mine just canna handle the number crunching and often shat itself. So alternative methods have too be found.

So What i did, is create a simple block, to dimensions according to the Anchor Stone Catalogue PDF file I found on the internet, I made it as little vertices as possible.

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Edit Mode: Purpose of these edges and faces is for UV mapping, export the UV map as image, and "paint" in gimp so I know where the "Beveled" lines are.. thus creating "false Bevel" ....

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First attempt of GIMP texture image creation. Looks bluddy awesome! but it does not have the "toy" feel tho....
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Second Attempt of creating the texture map in GIMP. Its so much better and so much fun doing this.. tho it did do my head in at times.

Because I did not do any Bevel Modifier, the vertices count is 136 (where as a beveled object would be 230+ vertices). However, that particular model, is just for Texture mapping purpose. The REAL model would have less vertices as possible, but maintain the texture UV mapping.

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The duplicated model with "limited Dissolve tool being used. The object is now 70 vertices.

Im going to take a break for an hour or two, then come back to do more GIMPing to get the image texture "just right".

EDIT:

Im happy with the final result:

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Note: The full view of the object is the one with 70 vertices, the object that is cut off from view.. is the one with 136 vertices...

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with a simple adding layers of colour fill within GIMP... and switching certain coloured layers on/off and changing layers to the front or back.. i get interesting results...

Looks great, I can't wait to see the full set and animation. If you have the opportunity after it's all set up, how would you feel about randomly sculpting some scratches and chips into a few of the blocks and then normal-mapping that effect back onto the low-rez blocks? Kind of add a little bit of realism and variety to the blocks--but that's an added expense of build time.

The idea reminds me of the mine-run animation that was part of the early Blender demo video, I think as far back as NAN days. It'd be cool to see your animation all cycled out with motion blur and all. Count me in for some render-time sharing if you need help during render time!

Cheers Bnb.. will do..

Currently, im still thinking of the map. That is.. how i the marble run course is laid out, and think about where building blocks goes.. before i could even seriously think about modelling.

Otherwise, if i model everything.. and found i only used a third of the objects.. i wasted me time lolz