I made this marble machine animation for my studio project in Video and Motion Graphics. It was a self-guided project and took over two months to plan and execute. I used Cinema 4D and rendered it in RedShift. I animated mostly using dynamics. The machine itself is comprised of rigid bodies (marbles) and collider bodies (the machine parts). The sound effects were designed in Adobe Audition after rendering the final video file.

The rendering took over three days to complete using multiple computers at a time. The project came out with a few little errors I would like to fix in the future. The conveyor belt stops moving too early, as well, the marbles came out too large in size as they leave the shower head.

In the end, I was very happy with this project! This was my first time using RedShift and I was very impressed with the results.

Process

Sketches

I started by making rough sketches. I drew up a few roughs brainstorming the mechanics of the machine and ended up with this final concept here.

Modelling

I started by blocking most of the objects I planned to model, adjusting the scene's layout, and then going in to add more details. While modelling from my rough sketch, my concept changed slightly because some ideas needed more time than I initially anticipated.

Lighting

I wanted the scene to be well-lit with minimal and very soft shadows. I set up a fill, rim, key, and dome light and moved them around until I was happy with how everything was looking.

Texturing

I went for Wes Anderson-inspired colours. I used transparent and foggy glass, rough and shiny plastics, and different stainless steel finishes for metals.

Animating

I mainly used dynamics to animate my project. I wanted the marbles to move through the machine as realistically as possible, so I set them as rigid bodies and everything else as collider bodies. When running dynamics, the marbles would often roll where I didn’t want them to go, so I had to bake a few movements and manually keyframe from the baked frames.

Cameras

I ended up using nine cameras in my scene, five stayed stationary.

Sound Design

After rendering in Redshift, I mixed my audio in Adobe Audition. I decided to save myself some time and purchase a marble sound effect pack, the pack was already mixed but I played around with the EQ and compression to make the marbles sound more plasticky. I still had to find some sound effects online but buying the sound effect pack definitely saved me some time.