Reactor Core v1

An experiment with some procedural textures and constraint based animation. It actually started as a modifier based animation but I couldn’t find any easy way to export the keyframes. It was easy to get the prototype; just an Array and Curve modifier and animate the offset. The final result was quite difficult though. I ended up using a bezier circle for each moving part with a Locked Track and Clamp To constraint. There were a million gotchas with the process like not being able to use proportional editing to move multiple circles, or how unintuitive the constraints are. The tiles were my first real experiment with procedural textures. Not too complicated. it’s a brick texture with some noise controlling the scale. The output of that was fed into the color and normal slots on a material and then baked. I did realize that Blender won’t save textures autmatically after baking though, so I had to rebake several times before I learned my lesson. Still not happy with the result but it was a good lesson.