WebGL Robot Arm

About

The first goal of this project was to take an existing model from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse and export it to Blender so the model could be converted to a format that the WebGL API could understand.

The second goal was to play with the parent & child relationship between 3D objects in ThreeJS. The base of the robot is a parent to the body, the body is a parent to the arm and so on... this type of logical structure allows the programmer to define connection points so when a parent moves the connected child objects move as well. I then apply random rotations and the output is pretty entertaining to watch.

Edit (2024-07-22): here is a more modern example on the ThreeJS website: https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_loader_collada_kinematics

See Project Here 

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Technology

• Javascript

• Three.js

• HTML WebGL

• Blender

• SketchUp