well at least I think it's cool

well at least I think it's cool

I tend to set Grand Challenges for myself. A few years ago, the Grand Challenge was to design a robot that could be packed into a very small volume - a cylinder a foot in diameter and four inches tall - that would unfold into a much larger wheeled robot. OK, so I did that. Then I realized that I would either have to build it or demonstrate in some other way that it would work.

Since I had designed the robot in 3D Canvas, and since that program allows animation, I did just that. Of course, video without sound is kinda... bleah. Therefore, I added part of the song Foreplay by Boston, and synchronized the video to the audio.

The video turned out to be a much tougher project than I realized at first. I have posted a few teasers of the work-in-progress on this blog, but that was back within the first thousand hits that I received, and therefore most of you will not have seen those clips.

I wanted to do something really cool for the upcoming Red Ensign Standard, so I figured I would finish the video, touching up a few errors I had made in my original clips. I had originally posted this on Google Video, but I have since posted it on YouTube, which made things a whole lot easier. Here it is:


The bulk of the video was shot using 3D Canvas, with the opening scenes done in Celestia. I used Virtual Dub for most of the video editing, and Audacity for the audio editing. Finally it was all compressed and a title added using Windows Movie Maker.

Sure, the lander looks a little hokey; it is just a stylized representation of a rocket ship. And the wheels look kinda flimsy - if I included the cables that attach to the ends of the spokes, crisscrossing each wheel, I would have nearly doubled the size of the work file and made the project much more complex to animate than it already was. And the WMV compression lowered the image quality more than I would like. Even so, I have to admit I am quite satisfied with the final results.

Will I do another animation? Yeah, sure, after I have my head examined. This sucker took WAY too much time to put together, much longer than it took me to design the robot. I think next time I'll just build something and then record the actual thing in action.

UPDATE: Here is a screenshot:



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