2025 Collab: Week 11 “Mechanical Automata” - VOTE CLOSED

[FedPete]

This is the Blender Collaboration 2025, week 11 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 “Mechanical Automata”.

• ‘Mechanical Automata’ – These are physical machines, often designed to mimic human or animal movements. Examples include old clockwork figures, like the ones in 18th-century music boxes or mechanical dolls." and etc.
  Could be anything from a clockwork robot to a mechanical gearbox. Usually, but not always it is self operable.
• Subject selected by the previous Week 10, 2025 “ Rube Goldberg Machine " winner Srl1

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.

Deadline: 2025-03-15T22:55:00Z

• Last week’s collab: Blender Collab: Week 10 “Light side / Dark side”
• Next week: 12 - Create a (video) game character
• See all previous challenges in Hall of Fame 2025
• Halls of fame 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020

If you want to stay informed of the @ BlenderCollab?
Subscribe or unsubscribe to this “BlenderCollab” group.

[Michael_Legrande]

Here’s my one hour attempt. This is a nice topic with lots of interesting things that can be done with it. I will try to find more time this week to add more. Made it into a gif as I don’t have a YouTube channel set up yet. I’ll look into doing that.

[Srl1]

awesome

[Srl1]

Thanks for sharing it early! I was a bit worried that people might find the theme too complex, but these simple machines really fit the theme and they look awesome!

[gallmerci]

I like that challenge. It is my first time to do some real animation: Here a moving (wannabe) caterpillar:

Mechanical Caterpillar Automata

Ok, here my final animation:

Mechanical Caterpillar Automata v2

Here a rendered image:

[Michael_Legrande]

I did have to google it to make sure I had the right concept.

[Srl1]

Well done! This looks really solid.

[Srl1]

I’m currently making this little automaton/clockwork robot inspired by an old game.

[HobbyPirates]

I was working on this earlier this week, but it was a little difficult to wrap my mind around how I was going to make it move - despite it being based on a real flying pig automata lol.

The problem is I also started my Godot courses and have been having fun going through those, so I just never made the time to complete this by the deadline. Really interesting topic for it though, and I love the ones that did get shared.

Farthest I made it while modelling before trying to figure out how I was going to move it but then stopping and failing to return:

Reference I was using:

Looking forward to the next topic since it was just shared too.

[Srl1]

Wow, this looks amazing! Actually, you don’t need to animate to participate - people are just going the extra mile, and that’s awesome. But your character already looks amazing, and you did a great job!

[FedPete]

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 12 “Create a (video) game” has already started. The winner of this week’s “Mechanical Automata” challenge may select a subject for next week 13 and win a badge.

Mechanical Automata

• Michael_Legrande
  

• gallmerci
  

  

• Srl1
  

  

• HobbyPirates
  

  

[FedPete]

@gallmerci congratulations on your clear implementation of an Automata. The visible mechanism clearly shows the mechanical functionality of an animated caterpillar.

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• Srl1 - Nice visual. It needs to have more functional Mechanical Automata. The Red button doesn’t have any mechanical relationship.
• Michael_Legrande - Clean animation!
• HobbyPirates - Very funny reference but your own interpretation of it would be great.

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Note: I don’t want to offend anyone. I try to write down positive ideas and visions in my simple use of the English language. I am also sometimes more inspired by a particular subject or solution. I’m also learning from you!

[Michael_Legrande]

Thanks, I am surprised I got any votes for my incomplete entry. I enjoyed doing it because I was working on the animation section of one of the courses. It allowed me to see if I really picked up what was being taught with something simple.