This is the Blender Collaboration 2025, week 09 challenge. Don’t be afraid to join, a lot of us are beginners. This is all to practice, have fun, learn, and get together.
This week’s subject is “Rube Goldberg Machine”.
Rube Goldberg Machine - A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way. See: Rube Goldberg machine
The rules are simple. 1 subject, 1 entry, 1 week.
You create whatever object or scene or whatever you can think of that has something to do with the subject. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, all entries are welcome!
Post your picture here in this thread. At the end of the week, we start to vote. And if you are the winner, you may choose the next subject and win a unique badge.
Finally getting to the pieces of my Rube Goldberg machine. Here’s a WIP (I still have more parts to model and put the whole thing together). Hopefully I’ll have a chance to animate it all as well…
To be honest, this was the first time I heard about a Rube Goldberg machine. The link you provided gave me some insights, and I got hooked instantly. Given the short time frame, I decided to reuse assets from my older renders and create an animation.
I know the basics of animating in Blender, but apart from moving the camera around, I haven’t explored much. So this is a bit of a challenge. I hope I get it right!
It’s not necessarily about getting it right, it’s really about learning and improving. It’s a good community here who will be glad to give you feedback.
I spent 2 hours experimenting with bone rigging to get the scissor mechanism to animate so the boxing glove could punch the bowling ball. It was ridiculous!
There’s also a mobile game based off of Rube Goldberg’s actual cartoons. And, yep, Goldberg’s machines were inspirations for The Incredible Machine, Quantum Conundrum, and, of course, the board game, Mousetrap (I love setting up the mousetrap more than playing the actual boardgame).
We @BlenderCollab have a few days to vote. You can vote fast but also think slowly about design, colors, technique, difficulty, subject, realism, etc. Choose consciously and not on your entry.
The new subject week 10 “Light side / Dark side” has already started. The winner of this week’s “Rube Goldberg Machine” challenge may select a subject for next week 11 and win a badge.
That poor, unsuspecting mouse .
Your post made me want to hunt for an animation I’d done of a rube goldberg-like machine for a Maya class I took ages ago. I found the link:
@Srl1 , congratulations on your complicated machine that sets a chain of events in motion until a final final test. It feels, to me, similar to the current political events in the world. A kind of Butterfly effect …
Designing and developing a Rube Goldberg machine was a difficult assignment for the Blender Collab. It involves a lot of Blender 3D technology, such as animation and physics. Also planning the project became important. Both entries showed a lot of fun and inventiveness. Well done, to both entries.
This was my first time doing physics simulation, animation, and video editing, but I had fun and learned something new. 
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. I only had a couple hours here and there for the collab.