SFX 2018 – Page 10 – Texas Applied Arts | The University of Texas at Austin

October 22, 2018, Filed Under: SFX 2018, student experience, Warbringer

She Shall Rise from Below the Deep Blue Sea

Hey, guys, my name is Darshan Desai and I am a member of the Warbringer team. I have really been enjoying this whole process of this project because I love model making and all the practicality we have to include makes it even better. The ship has been coming along great and so far the team has been working like a well-oiled machine

This week was kind of a major road bump due to the loss of a team member, so we have had all hands on deck and been trying to get more done. Luckily we had divided up certain parts of the project that way each person had something to focus on rather than working on one thing at a time. I was tasked with raising the Proudmoore from the ground and so I got to work trying to figure out first what I had available in order to automate such movement. But still fuzzy on the idea I came up with a way to hand automate the jack for the time being. So I settled on a scissor jack, because of its ability to collapse and there are numerous ways to automate it as well. Once that was figured out we ran into the problem of the size of the ship sitting under “water” so we then cut the ship in half then I had to rethink of how to make the ship reconnect when it’s in view of the audience when above the water.

This past week we all took our models, Kyle- masts Kaan- ship Darshan-jack, and juiced them up a little and added some extra TLC. We 3D modeled the ship in 2 pieces, as well as laser cut the sticks for the jack and 3D printed the mast and crows nest. We have all the major pieces completed know we just need to do a little troubleshooting and brush up the concepts and put everything together.

Due to the sudden loss of a team member from the class, we all collectively took over the artistry part of the project and we started to play with different textures and colors to get different loos to resemble the old rustic ship.

October 22, 2018, Filed Under: SFX 2018

DA ARMnimatronic

Our goal is to create a realistic looking arm snap due to a malevolent force consuming the owner of the arm’s body. Now of course visual effects and a green screen could do wonders for us, but we want whoever is watching our effect to feel so uncomfortable it’s as if their own arm is breaking. We plan on achieving this by having a silicone arm cast rip open and snap caused by an animatronic hidden beneath the skin of our arm cast to achieve a more lifelike snap.

The animatronic will simulate two bones being snapped in any direction we choose. The four blue oval shaped objects in the figure above, or the bones as I will refer to them, will be able to move in any direction (North, South, East, West, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest). This will be achieved by having each of he two oval shaped bone pieces closer to the elbow attached to one side of the left and right universal joints (described in figure below). This side will be move freely whereas the other side of the universal joint will be fixed to something like a wooden block. The side that can move freely has an L shaped 3-D printed object with a hole on each side of the L. One end of a rod is loosely attached to each hole and the other end of the rod is loosely attached to a servo motor. The rods are loosely attached so that the servo motor can push the rod more effectively. Each bone will have two servo motors each. One motor will push/pull left/right and the other motor will push/pull up/down. When both motors are moving at the same time, the bone can move in any direction besides backwards.

This is a simulation of how the universal joints can rotate. Our version has one side fixed leaving the other side to rotate freely in any direction.

The other side of the blue oval shape closer to the elbow is loosely tied to one side of the other blue oval on the same side. This is so that the oval controlled by the servo motors can control the other oval not connected to the servos. For example, when the servo oval is pulled up, the attached side of the other oval will move up as well. The other side of the oval not controlled by the servo motors is attached to one side of a universal joint so that it too can move freely. The other side of that universal joint will stay fixed to another wooden block or something.

This is an example of an instance of the animatronic moving. The oval controlled by servos closer to the elbow will puppet the other oval and move it. This multi-directional animatronic can give us the freedom to snap the arm in any direction we want so we can see what looks best.

Our chosen material for the bones was originally ABS plastic from a 3-D printer but it would have too much of our time to wait for each oval to finish printing. Instead, we are going with a wooden dowel we shaped to be round to roll along the attached bone piece that is also rounded. This saves us so much time while also keeping the bone strong. The universal joints will be 3-D printed to save us some money. I designed them myself and I used them in the past so I know they work. The servo motors will be standard high torque servos so they can push the thick silicone skin. The servo motors will be controlled by an Arduino. For my next post, I will show how to use an Arduino to control servo motors, sensors, LEDs, sound, etc.

October 22, 2018, Filed Under: SFX 2018

It only cost us an arm (and no legs)

We went back and forth on what we wanted to make our robot arms out of, as we did not want to make them to heavy to move around, and in the end we decided that very thin cardboard sheets were the way to go. Our robot has a very interesting shape of forearms as they seem to kind of have a piece that is longer that extends from the arm at the bottom.

We did not know exactly how to approach making it but we figured the forearms must look something like this.

So we decided to take on a very hands on approach. We wrapped Alex’s arm up with sheets of paper in order to get a “cast” so we could properly have a forearm shape. In the video you can see us stop halfway and realize that the shape we were drawing out was not going to work out and looked nothing like the original drawing of the comic which is when we ended up doing the design above.

After we had outline the shape, we cut up here cast, traced what we had outlined onto thin cardboard stock and glued it together. The arm is two different colors because of the paint options we were trying out and the thin black “bracelet near the wrist is just a thin piece of foam with lines pressed into it to give it the design we wanted.

After placing the hand on it, we realized that we had no wrist support making the hand flop all over the place. We added a water noodle on the inside wrapped tightly with cardboard, and on the inside of the wrist we put a small piece of foam with two bolts on either side of the wrist allowing us a slight back and forth wrist motion while also giving us the support we needed.

Putting it all together!

We repeated the cast and tracing process again with the forearm.

And here is our semi-finished product!

For our elbow “joint” we decided to take paper towels, wrap them up as tightly, but still loosely enough that it’s not heavy, with tape and repeated the process until we had a ball big enough to fit our upper arm. We are now in the process of re-attaching our hand, painting it, and then attaching that onto our actual robot body!

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