7 Segment Display (Robot arm concept)

Hello! Long time no see!

I have finally had my long summer break where I have moved to a new studio! So I got to try it briefly in a livestream 4 days ago which was really exciting! The studio is not completely finished yet, but I plan on making a video about it that shows you all the details! So stay tuned for that, because it's my absolute dream studio, and I'm extremely excited about it!

Now, the 7 segment display robot arm concept! 🦾 I've been posting a bit about this on instagram, and it's also shown at the end of my latest youtube video.

So the idea was to make a stream countdown timer, but the concept got increasingly more complex and I ended up with 7 rigged robot arms that move each segment in and out of a sharp area light. So instead of the segments turning on and off like a normal clock, I wanted to manipulate their position to get the effect of the clock changing!

The scene has way too many details at the back of the arms that i wasn't able to show in the final render. So I was thinking it could be fun to do a render where there's a mirror that lets us see it from behind and from the front at the same time.

Technical note: If you open the scene and poke around in it, you might notice that the arms have one separate armature object each. This is a concequence of me not thinking ahead when setting up this project, so it's a little bit impractical to work with. Specifically selecting the armatures can be cumbersome, but what I recommend doing is selecting one armature and press Shift + G to Select Type. Since there are no other armature objects in the scene, you'll automatically have all the armature for all the robot arms selected. And then you can press Ctrl + Tab for Edit Mode and then press A to select all the IK controllers (because I've hidden all the other bones, which can be unhidden with Alt + H when in Edit Mode).

So this was a really fun project to play around with, and I'm really excited to see what you'll create with these 7 segment display concepts!

Textures used are Creative Commons 0 from AmbientCG, and they are packed with the .blend files.

Thanks for the support!

Asbjørn 🌊