Rube Goldberg Device Contest Winners Announced

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300px-blengine.jpgThe winners of Erwin Coumans’ Rube Goldberg Device Contest have been announced. In case you don’t know, the objective of this contest was to model A Rube Goldberg Device (or ‘Incredible Machine’) using Blender’s Rigid Body physics. There were fifteen entries and I just finished watching a few – it’s great fun!

While you can watch the results on YouTube, I recommend you download the .blend files and play them back on your own computer.

Erwin wrote:

There have been 15 great Rube Goldberg Machines for the Bullet Physics Contest 2007. It was hard to decide on the winners amongst all nominees:

1st Prize, Playstation 3: blengine. Watch this entry.
2nd Prize, Nintendo Wii: blenderguy / endif. Watch this entry.
3rd Prize, 50 US Dollar: moobins. Watch this entry.

You can see all the entries as YouTube videos, or download the .blend files from the contest page.

Congratulations and thanks for everyones efforts, and if you didn’t win this time, perhaps next contest!

Well done everyone, and a BIG thanks for Erwin for setting up such a cool contest!

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    • http://blenderart.org nam

      Maybe it’s just me, but the blend files that I run myself has a different effect, such as the Winners Machine when the tennis ball drops out of the vent, it just rolls off the table and an infinite wait time for nothing to happen, and the 2nd place’s machine, when the balls is rolling down the tracks at the beginning and is suppose to knock the domino’s over, the dominoes actually starts falling towards the ball and I guess it ends there…Is it possible that the physics may not work the same depending on the computer that it’s run on? I have a macbook pro btw…

    • http://www.cyphertxt.com GustavTheMushroom

      Good work all! Congrats!

      (Im jealous of the PS3 btw… Awesome prize… Someone is going to be a happy winner)

    • http://www.cuby.co.nr Cuby

      Wow! Really fantastic entries! I loved all of the first 3!

      Nice stuff! Oh man, I wish I could win a PS3!

    • mrcarnivore

      @nam: I suspect the contestants cheated a little bit, because I think the result is very hard to get using real simulations…

    • endif

      quote: “Maybe it’s just me, but the blend files that I run myself has a different effect, such as the Winners Machine when the tennis ball drops out of the vent, it just rolls off the table and an infinite wait time for nothing to happen, and the 2nd place’s machine, when the balls is rolling down the tracks at the beginning and is suppose to knock the domino’s over, the dominoes actually starts falling towards the ball and I guess it ends there…Is it possible that the physics may not work the same depending on the computer that it’s run on? I have a macbook pro btw…”

      Well it was designed to work on xp and it has very tight peramiters (ie: change any variable a slight bit and it wont work, it probably wont work under linux either :( )

      Quote: “I suspect the contestants cheated a little bit, because I think the result is very hard to get using real simulations…”

      I only “cheated” once at the very end, and that was just involving the fan switch! even the example entry used ipo’s!

    • endif

      so it wasn’t cheating!

    • http://blendernewbies.com Kernon

      That was fun to watch. Congratulations to the winners.

      Just because something is very hard doesn’t mean it’s not doable, especially if you’re willing to work hard enough to get it done.

    • CasperN

      Nice works! Congratulations to the winners, ps3, shit that is a nice price…

    • Gat

      Nice job! The first one looks like it was a tone of work.

    • http://bulletphysics.com erwin

      The .blend files should work on windows 32bit. The physics behaviour differs on different platform so you might not be able to run each machine to the end.

      That’s why the Youtube movies are on the website.

      Enjoy!
      Erwin
      http://bulletphysics.com

    • LazyCoder

      Dang, I can’t see any of the videos at school because they blocked youtube.

    • j0llyr0ger

      Well, I must tell all the doubters that the first and second place winners are real.

      Despite running Win XP, blengine and endif’s didn’t work. Blengine’s tennis ball missed the dominoes and endif’s ruler didn’t knock down the ball that should have fallen in the glass.

      However, after spending the past 45 minutes tweaking and slightly adjusting certain objects in the two files slightly, they both play all the way through. Moving one object in blengine’s file makes the ball fall on the dominoes and it plays fine. In endif’s I had to add a few more polys to the bottom rail the first ball falls through to get it to consistently make the dominoes fall. After that it was fine.

      So to those for whom they don’t play right because of physics calculation discrepancies, you can tinker with them a bit and make them work.

    • http://waynefox3.googlepages.com Waynefox3

      Well i didnt win but i had fun
      i bet if i would have polished mine a bit more it would have done better
      but what are ya gonna do
      anyway it was fun
      im on to my next Projext now

    • http://blender.blog.siol.net/ PiPi

      Simply amazing! Congratulations to all!

      .::PiPi::.

    • Ella

      This is amazing

    • Ella

      This is one awesome job!!!!

    • http://www.steam-train.de/ Haunt_House

      Congrats, Blengine!! Oh dear, if I wasn’t living behind the moon, I’d have realized that the p3 is a blueray player. You might have had additional competition.

      Cheers

      Haunt