Modeling and Animating a Sci-Fi Hatch

Instructor:
Guest Instructor


Create Detailed Mechanical Animations in Blender

In this course, we'll cover the complete process of modeling, rigging, and animating a sci-fi hatch. This is the sort of thing you might find on a Space Station or underground bunker. It's fairly intricate, mechanically, with three separate locking systems and a series of gears.

Model Hard-surface Sci-fi Elements

In the first section of the tutorial, we'll focus on the modeling. Starting with a circle, we'll expand from that to model both the main door object and the back wall/floor that the hatch connects to. The floor will be made in two parts, leaving room for the door to slide between them. We'll also start construction of the various locking mechanisms and mechanical parts.

Rig Fast Without Armatures

In the second part of the tutorial, we'll focus on rigging. In the previous course ("Mechanical Rigging of a Fighter Jet in Blender") we focused heavily on the Transformation constraint and Local Space. In this section, we'll use some different constraints and techniques to achieve the result we're looking for. We'll also use "World Space" as an input and see how that can be useful. In the end, all of the mechanical systems will be rigged for simpler animation.

Animate Mechanisms

Finally we will animate the complete door and all the mechanisms to unlatch and open. We will animate each part by key framing the start and end position of each object. After the initial position we'll then adjust the animation by tweaking the animation curve from the graph editor.


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Awarded upon completion:
100xp +
Course Curriculum
1 Review
  • Brad Wheeler(brad-nbo) ·

    A fast paced course jam-packed with lots of info you got to keep up with the instructor. Not for absolute beginners though. I had fun creating the animated door and did a little embellishing for further practice on the concepts and instructions. The instructor focuses more on the animating than he does on going step by step in how to model and goes quickly through the modeling and there is a lot of modeling involved, so knowing how to model is recommended. I'd also suggest paying attention to the proportions after you make the initial slots. You'll be copying the first rig you make so that the second rig fit inside these slots. I made my first rig way too big and had to make some readjusting so everything would be more in proportion to best fit the door assembly, so the mechanisms aren't encroaching on each other.

    If you're up for a challenge and want to learn about animating with keyframes I'd recommend this course. I liked the course due to the topic, the project and the challenge of it.

    I did it in Blender 3.3.7 and I believe this was recorded before 2.8 but was still easy enough to follow along.