3D Marble Run

Marble run created in Cinema 4D

Athanasios Pozantzis hosted a series of demonstrations by Lionel Vicidomini over on Cineversity outlining Lionel's process for creating marble simulations. For years now, the "motor" and "spring" functions have been hiding there in the simulations menu, untouched by me. Until now...

Rendered in Redshift

I'd built a small scale marble run as a test project, but this was the grand finale to my week of marble experiments, the world's most needlessly-complicated desk lamp.

It begins with a spring loaded plunger that fires the marble through a loop. From there, the path is 100% physics-based. No cheating, though I did use some field attractors in the ferris wheel. The final climb up the mountain also required a lot of wrestling with collider objects, speed variations, and re-sizing to overcome the ball's tendency to fly off the track or clip through the geometry.

Color inspired by New Super Marios Bros

When it came time to texture, once again I turned to After Effects—preferring its workflow over Illustrator or Photoshop.

I pulled inspiration from Wii U's "New Super Mario Bros" tile sets. That style seemed appropriately whimsical for the scene.

On a personal note, this animation did rather well on social media. At the time, I'd been down-sized from my Senior Editor position for the Bluehost brand. The new regime there seems determined to gleefully help further inflate the AI bubble and needed room in the budget to purchase that trendy Oracle hosting (even though Bluehost Cloud has the infrastructure investment already) so naturally a half dozen of us had to have our positions (salaries) sacrificed. All that to say, it was validating to watch this silly little demo animation out perform the SLOP my former company put up that same week. Maybe if they had listened to me more?