Modeling and Animating a Sci-Fi Hatch

Create Detailed Mechanical Animations in Blender

In this course, we’ll cover the complete process of modeling, rigging, and animating a sci-fi hatch. This is the sort of thing you might find on a Space Station or underground bunker. It’s fairly intricate, mechanically, with three separate locking systems and a series of gears.

Model Hard-surface Sci-fi Elements

In the first section of the tutorial, we’ll focus on the modeling. Starting with a circle, we’ll expand from that to model both the main door object and the back wall/floor that the hatch connects to. The floor will be made in two parts, leaving room for the door to slide between them. We’ll also start construction of the various locking mechanisms and mechanical parts.

Rig Fast Without Armatures

In the second part of the tutorial, we’ll focus on rigging. In the previous course (“Mechanical Rigging of a Fighter Jet in Blender”) we focused heavily on the Transformation constraint and Local Space. In this section, we’ll use some different constraints and techniques to achieve the result we’re looking for. We’ll also use “World Space” as an input and see how that can be useful. In the end, all of the mechanical systems will be rigged for simpler animation.

Animate Mechanisms

Finally we will animate the complete door and all the mechanisms to unlatch and open. We will animate each part by key framing the start and end position of each object. After the initial position we’ll then adjust the animation by tweaking the animation curve from the graph editor.