An animation created as part of the Dynamic Machines community challenge organised by Clinton Jones.

The brief?  Help create the internet's largest Rube Goldberg machine, by creating an animated contraption which feeds a marble downwards, to be linked together with others to form one giant video-based marble-moving montage.

In total, 1,900 3D creators - amateur and professional alike - submitted their animations to create this amazing machine, the whole of which can be viewed here on Youtube.

Marbleforge can be seen in the middle of the montage here.

Design

Marbleforge was an exercise in theatre more than believable design.

I wanted to evoke a sense of an eccentric, aging laboratory with brass fixtures, etheral lighting, liberal use of glass and advanced-yet-aging technology.  The dynamic feature of the sequence is that the marble is sliced in half, with both halves travelling through the machine independently as a point of difference.

All elements were modelled, animated, rendered and composited in Blender.