The Piano Printer V2 - Marble Physics Simulation (Beethoven | Für Elise)
12,896I've synchronized Beethoven's Für Elise to over a thousand marbles bouncing on the piano keys. The marbles collect at the bottom and are colored to create a picture. I learned how to use Blender to make this video, and I can't believe that it's a free tool. There are SO many cool possibilities when you can bake the physics to keyframes. I will definitely be using it for other ideas.
Here was my first attempt at the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myFR8FTXOM4
I think in 3D it is a lot more interesting. This video was rendered in Blender's Eevee engine. I'm not very experienced with scene lighting and textures, but I think I can improve on the next one to make it look better. I also tried out Blender's cycles rendering engine which uses ray tracing, and it looks incredible! Unfortunately it took my PC about 30 seconds per frame to render, and there is 5,500 frames in this video, so that would take over 45 hours to render. Another option would be for me to use money from patreon to pay a render farm to do it faster.
There are two instances where the notes are played too quickly in succession, causing the marbles to spawn inside each other and push their velocities to hit the keys at the incorrect time. I'll have to fix that with the next version.
Credit to Bernd Krueger for his original transcription to the midi file. I did have to make a couple modifications to fit my model.
Also thank you to Benjamin Costello for pointing me in the right direction and convincing me to try blender.
Special thanks to every one of my supporters on Patreon! If you'd also like to support me the link is below.
https://www.patreon.com/doodlechaos
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