Rube Goldberg the name comes from an engineer named Reuben Goldberg who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in the year 1904. Rube Goldberg used to sketch and drawing by taking reference from newspapers and magazines. But persuade the profession of engineering due to his father as he opposed the field of cartoons. After designing sewer systems for 6 months, he left the job after feeling distress and unsatisfied and joined a company named as San Francisco Chronicle to pursue the field of cartoon making, followed by sketching fighters in an MMA boxing ring.

In spite not being a famous artist in the beginning Goldberg hit of and became famous for his comics and news articles. But it was Goldberg’s invention series in which he showcased his engineering knowledge in comics, starring professor Lucifer Gorgonzola which was the best remembered. Later on, his knowledge of engineering was used to create elaborate contraptions to complete the simple tasks in an extraordinary way. These cartoons led Goldberg to win the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1948. And thus, these machines were created in real life and bears his namesake.

In this project we had to create our own Rube Goldberg’s machine. The fun part about this project was to plan and design our own machine. My plan for this project was to make use of the Collisions of the tool named “BULLET” in maya as well as making use of the Constraints in Maya.

In this plan the main task was to design and create the elements of the Machine. It was big and a difficult task to plan this machine, as we had to take care about the real life physics that would affect the ball which would result in falling and colliding with the Dominoes (bricks) and also planning about which constraints would be applicable for the plan and give me the best result. Along with this, I also had to look about HOW would the elements connect to each other without causing any problems.

After planning the main task of implementing started. This Rube Goldberg machine was made with the help Bullet solver in which we can use the physics and kinematics to create our FX. Bullet Solver is a simple but a vast field to begin with. It has varieties of tools such as Passive Rigid Body, Kinematic Rigid Body, Soft Body, Rigid Body Constraint, etc. In bullet we can set the selected objects to be rigid, soft, etc. by which we can manipulate its mass, collision attributes and many other things.

When we assign a bullet tool to a object, it begins with giving us a default Bullet Solver and a rigid Body Shape node which is added to the selected object.

The Assigned rigid body has various types of settings which are to be manipulated to get the desired output. We can also select multiple objects at a single time while applying the bullet dynamics to it. Mass, Friction and restitution plays a very important role in dynamics. While mass represents the over all weight of the object/geometry, friction takes care about the smooth collision between the object and collider. Restitution on the other hand helps in the amount of bounce that the object will have. Higher the amount of restitution more the geometry will have the bounce force.

Collision shape takes a very crucial part when collision. There are various types of collision shapes such as Box, Sphere, Grid, which are usually used for default objects respectively. If in case we have a geometry that is not a default shape (box, sphere, grid), we need to use Hull or an auto compound which manipulates this shape as per the geometry and skins itself to it.

I used the hinge constraint which help in limiting the rotation and the movement of the object as if it was fixed by a hinge joint, like that of a door.

Playing with constrains was a bit difficult as it was not sticking to the geometry and its pivot point was slipping of the geometry. This problem was faced by numerous others classmates.

To solve this problem we have to reset the setting of the constraint tools before applying it to the geometry, deleting the history of the selected object. After that step we have to change and set the pivot point of the constraint to the center of the geometry so that it doesn’t cause the slip of the pivot.