Gears Render Dump and Explanation

Video of final render and wireframe gears walkthrough at bottom

This was made for Pwnisher's Dynamic Machines challenge in 15 days. Scheduling was tricky as I worked full-time during the project. Initially I struggled with concepts, but was heavily inspired by mechanical design animations and LEGO gear channels on YouTube. I decided to throw the kitchen sink at this model. Lighting was via an HDRI of an apartment (warm with a blue light coming from a TV), and a three point lighting setup. Backlight coming from SSS of back canvas/leather, fill light was a soft light on bottom left, and key light was a sharper light on top right. All modeled in Maya and rendered in Arnold. No kitbashing kits used, only external model were the Nautilus spiral gears (open source online CAD model). Full gear description below.

The ball starts off being hit by the Newton cradle, so the cradle stops once the momentum gets transferred to the ball.

The hammer was a tricky gear system to make, as I approached all systems by creating expressions between every gear (so that I didn't have to animate each one separately, I could just animate the drive gear and the expressions would take care of the rest). The hammer had to swing forward and back, pause, and repeat. I ended up combining three different gear sets in this system - one that rotates back and forth constantly, one that converts constant rotation to periodic rotation, and one that translated the rotational motion by 90degrees.

The ball then goes up the slide using a system that translates rotational to linear motion, then goes down an elevator using a similar rotational-to-linear system that goes a bit faster.

From there it rolls into a copper wire coil that acts as a worm gear to push the ball through the coil. I wanted the coil to start spinning slowly then accelerate, so I used nautilus (golden spiral) gears where the gear ratio actually changes with rotation. The math for the expression was weird, but instead of writing it all out there's an article on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-circular_gear

The ball goes through the copper coil to generate electricity, which is fed into the ammeter and light bulb. We'll just pretend the ball is magnetized.

At this point I was running out of time, so instead of creating different systems and piecing them together I made a slide for the remainder of the route (after it drops out of the glass tube) and cut the slide into different pieces, using different systems to make the slide come together at the perfect time. These include a fast linear motion system (which I used as a mini crane), a set of triangular Reuleaux mechanisms, and cool looking lotus gears (the same kind used in watches) that rotate in increments from a constant rotation.

If you made it this far down I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read and look through my post! Honestly some of the systems I spent the most time on were in the background of the video, but I learned a lot creating them!