They say a picture's worth a thousand words. If that's the case, then what happens when you can make those pictures move?

So much of design is made up of communicating concepts and ideas. The ability to do so graphically can offer a vastly improve flow of information, and technology continues to improve our options to achieve this, especially with complex concepts and forms that are highly dependent not just on shapes but also movement.

For this project, our team decided to tackle one such complex form, deciding to create a high fidelity model and animation for a robotic armature, in this case a Scorbot ER V.

This project was split into four primary steps, each requiring specific tools. They were as follows:

• Disassembly - For utmost accuracy and precision, a complete tear down of the assembly was performed, with dimensional measurements achieved using calipers and micrometers
• Modeling - Static 3D models of each of the over 300 parts were created. PTC Creo was used, as its interface is highly effective when working with the parametric attributes, such as position, orientation, and geometric tolerance, that were key to accurately representing these parts
• Animation - Once completed, part models were transferred to Autodesk 3ds Max. While less effective for initial model creation, 3ds Max offered far greater motion, camera, lighting, material, background, and rendering control
• Editing - Final cuts and audio synching were achieved using Adobe Premiere

Multiple lessons were learned during this project.  The first was that the right software has a huge effect on project efficiency and capability, and it's always important to keep an open mind as to whether or not one is utilizing the best tool for the job.  In addition, it was also important not to confuse maximum effort with optimum effort. We found many times that certain attributes, such as resolution, could reach a threshold where further increases had a negligible effect on the final outcome, but could eat up substantial amounts of additional processing power and time.  Again, regularly assessing how efficiently we were working was key to keeping things moving smoothly and allowing enough time to create a final product we could be proud of.