Marble Maze

3D Rendering of a popular children's toy I had when I was a kid.

Modeled and rendered with Lightwave. Not to scale; I drew this from memory.

The motion was generated with HardFX hard-body dynamics. I had a really rough time getting the physics to work right. If you look closely you can see that I had to drop each rail slightly below each corner piece to prevent the marble from bouncing when exiting the tunnel. However, you may notice a small bounce when exiting the tunnels, especially the first tunnel. I wasn't able to avoid that completely.

I rendered this with higher fidelity than my previous animation renderings. It took forever and a day to render. I let it run overnight while I was sleeping and I still had to cut corners for it to finish before I woke up.

I also posted a higher resolution still image here. [link]