MarIOnette
MarIOnette is a blender plugin for controlling animatronics and robotics inside Blender. During my time working at IDEO’s Playlab, I frequently found myself struggling to create dynamic and elegant motion for complex animatronics. The culmination of these was Jurassic Alpha Blue, which had 6 motors that all had to be meticulously animated through code. Disney Imagineering and Anki served as an inspiration for how to simplify this process. I leveraged Blender, the free and open source VFX tool, and created an addon in Python to allow users to send animations through Serial to a microcontroller. The tool has been constantly evolving and finally received an open-source, public release in the spring of 2023.
MarIOnette runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It supports a large range of actuators like servos, PWM signals, stepper motors, LEDs (neopixel or single channel), and digital output pins
Inverse kinematics are resolved on the fly by Blender directly once the user properly sets up the rig. An in-depth tutorial was created to walk users through the entire process of building and setting up a drawing robot to familiarize people with the tool.
Different types of actuators can be mixed together to create compelling and dynamic performances
Indexable LEDs like neopixels can be controlled and animated using Blender's built-in Geometry Nodes feature
Blender serves as an amazing visualization tool; users can test out animations and motions digitally before moving to the real thing and introducing wear and tear on components
With a special type of actuator (Dynamixel or similar Bus Servo), reverse animation is also possible, where the user creates an animation by directly manipulating the physical model