Video

Video: Wind-up Mechanical Chess Box

Bart ·
3D chessboard cube with mechanical arms, dark background.

I recently picked up playing chess again and I really loved Marty’s new looping chess video!

This is a render I made of a wind-up mechanical box that cycles a game of chess across its top.

I had been wanting to model a full chess set in Blender for a while, but couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with it until this idea popped into my head. Modeling the wooden carving was a fun twist to the project. It was also challenging to figure out the best way to get the pieces to move across the board as the board moved under them.

This was created in Blender 4.4 and rendered in Cycles with Optix. All the materials in the scene are procedural. I pulled and mixed the sound effects from various libraries I’ve purchased and edited the video in Adobe Premiere.

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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