Mechanical Rigging using Ryan King Art's tutorial

After finishing the Blender Guru donut tutorial I wanted to look into articulated objects. Initially I looked at Blender skeletons but then I found Ryan King Art’s tutorial on mechanical rigging.

Basically for each rigid object the following steps are executed:

• The 3D cursor is set to a point on the center of the joint axis
• The origin of the rigid object is set to the 3D cursor
• The parent of the rigid object is set to the other object it is connected to via the joint (while maintaining the transformation)
• All forbidden translation axes and rotation axes are locked

The resulting object then can be animated by defining keyframes for joint angles as shown in Blender Guru donut tutorial part 11. Rendering the video using the Cycles engine on my 8 core CPU took 3.5 hours. If you have a GPU supported by Blender this would take much less time.

See below for the resulting video: