Never giving up those burgers lol, although that’d be really cool having a suit version that you could treat like a car you don’t have to get out of- really should start 3dprinting stuff
Thank you for sharing! You struck a great pose for the robot running cross-country.
@brandall Thanks, had to pretend-run to remember which hand would go with which foot lol
He’s ready for animation, but I’m focusing more on “Tower” before making anything else too elaborate before I run off to college.
Also thought it would be fun to expand on the “No context” series a little bit
Unbelievable. You’re in college? So impressive. Wow, sky’s the limit for you with all your creativity and skills. What are you studying?
I’m actually starting this summer, shooting for game development since that’s kind of flatlined, this town stifles things pretty thoroughly. I’ll finally be “escaping” as it were, a little late but the sky isn’t the limit, I feel this is just the beginning 
You absolutely got this!
Hello there. It’s been a bit. I hope you are doing well. Really like your star wars destroyer!
My son is interested in developing games, and I noticed you did a nice job of creating that robot and making him run in a realistic manner. Would you mind sharing how you made him? It looks like maybe I could help my son create characters in Sketchup, but I’m not sure how to go about doing the rigging and animating in Sketchup. If you could help illuminate what is behind the curtain, that would be very helpful. My son is 11 and just beginning his journey of coding with a simple program called Scratch. Thank you.
To me it looks like that whatever @BlueBlankey is using for rigging and animating, it is something else than SketchUp.
Anssi,
Thank you. It feels that way to me too. He’s so talented.
@brandall Hi thanks, making something like that in two days isn’t worth it when you feel it for two weeks afterwards lol. School is a bit more involved than I was expecting but I’m still trying to think of a cool idea for the Curious creature competition. (And hopefully not make it another marathon)
Sketchup can’t really be used for animation in video games since it can’t export any animated geometry. You can render out animations with the Animator extension, which is amazing for mechanical objects but doesn’t support inverse kinematic so it won’t work well for characters.
I personally export the geometry into “3d studio max” and rig the model for animation there. 3dsmax requires a license, but a free alternative is a program called “Blender”, and I highly recommend it for aspiring gamedevs even though I don’t use it (yet). For actual game developing I use “Unreal engine 5”, and they’re putting a lot of effort into making it a one-stop shop for modeling/rigging/animating, although for the most part it’s reliant on something like blender/3dsmax/sketchup for most of the assets.
For texturing I used “Substance Painter”, which requires UV coordinates for unwrapping a 2d image on a 3D surface, which can be done in Sketchup but for complex characters with specific details it’ll have to be done in 3dsmax/blender.
For the actual animation I tried out a website called Mixamo, which has a lot of motion-captured assets you can use on bipedal characters. I rigged the robot’s skeleton armature manually, but the website supports automatic rig generation. With a little bit of tweaking/trouble shooting you can get some immediate results, which is pretty fun.
Making animations really isn’t as easy as it should be in any software in my opinion, but learning the basics and making simple things will be a huge headstart especially for a younger person. If scratch supports simple animations it’d probably be best to start there, as most of these softwares are “industry standard” and maybe a bit complex for just starting out. It’ll take a lot of time to get to “the cool stuff”, but if he finds a way to enjoy the process it’ll feel like nothing at all.
BB, I’m at work right now and can’t write a full response, but just wanted to quickly confirm I got your response. I know you must be busy too, so thank you for being so thoughtful in your response to me. I will digest it and get back to you. I am very fortunate to meet people like you on this forum who are so talented and willing to help others. May the force be with you 
Amazing talent. Keep at it.
BB,
Hope you are feeling recovered from your star destroyer marathon. Thank you for clarifying that Sketchup is not used for animated characters. I saw your robot running and thought maybe it had been modeled in Sketchup and then rigged in another program. Now I know better. I don’t have 3D Studio Max at home, so thank you for making me aware of Blender. I will give that a try. Thanks for the additional tips about Substance Painter and Mixamo. If my son and I can generate anything worth viewing, I’ll post something on my own page and let you know. Don’t hold your breath. We’re in the “discovering how to rub sticks together to make fire” 
stage of things compared to your futuristic robots running around to do your bidding 
Your first assumption is on the money- speed racer was made in Sketchup and exported/rigged elsewhere. It takes some cleaning up but the polygons don’t care where they came from, so characters for games from Sketchup is totally a thing.
I personally prefer Sketchup since I view the journey as important as the destination, and growing models without a specific plan makes for more original designs in my esoteric opinion. Blender is great if you know exactly what you’re going for and it’s definitely the hot thing right now, and for making games it’s probably the better bet for interfacing with the industry.
Keep him pushing for greatness though- it’s the user, not the tool. It’s taken awhile to reach this point but these things are caveman stick rubbing compared to what I’m planning on doing believe it or not, so keep on striving, the journey never ends.
But in other news the dust’s settled and feeling recovered, have an idea for a creature, and viewing it as a more major project since it’ll be ~20 days rather than 2. Thinking a cool name like “project Starlight” would be a nice indication of the theme.
Figured out what project Starlight actually is, now for the fun part of going insane with the details
Was also feeling a little nostalgic and was sifting through old models, I’m noticing a big pattern going on
It seems that model ideas have been growing off each other, and these branches go on for long strings of related projects. The process of making them already kind of follows that pattern but it’s cool to see it’s happening at a higher level as well.
→ → → → →
→
Might be fun to categorize them all and figure out where they’re actually coming from, it’s kind of fun imagining what the next one will be too 
Wow ! 
Holy moly - what a fantastic work.
Always nice to see your posts! Hope things are going well with college. With you stepping back to see patterns in your work, it sounds like you’ve had some time on the porch to consider what you’ve done in the yard. I like to call the process “porch and lawn.” Sometimes you need to be out in the yard tending to the lawn, bushes, and weeds, and sometimes you need to sit back on the porch and look at and consider what needs doing.