Stop Motion With Bubbles: Instructables Robot Float Animation

I've always enjoyed stop motion films such as Isle of Dogs and wanted to try my first 3D stop motion project. And it turns out creating your own stop motion short with "floating" models isn't as hard as you think. It's a great introduction to 3D modeling, and to spice it up we will be modeling our own Instructables Robot!

Due to limited resources and my skill level, for this project I used Womp3D, a free 3D modeling software. I also used a niche Image to Video Converter called Konvertor. I also cropped the final video to a smaller size by using a tool from 123Apps. All tools are free, run in your browser, and can be found below:

https://www.womp.com/

https://konvertor.vercel.app/#app

https://online-video-cutter.com/crop-video

Log into Womp3D and boot up a blank project. Set the background color to any color of your choosing that has good contrast with blue hues by clicking on the background and changing it in the right menu. Set the viewing of your scene to Orthographic and set the perspective to either the left or right by using the top right panel. You can now add your first cube into the scene through the object panel in the top left. With our viewing and perspective, the cube resembles a square which is what we want.

A gray cube looks nothing like the ocean, so the first order of business is to give the cube a blue material. Select the cube and click on Default Material. You could find a different template material to use, but I made my own blue material using the properties shown in the image. Feel free to play around with what works best. Following that, elongate and transform the shape into a rectangle so that it takes up enough of the scene. This is our ocean!

It is time to build our robot. Add a cylinder into the scene through the object panel. Play around with its size but be sure to keep its position roughly center in the view. Change its default material to a yellow color and crank up its metalness and roughness. If your ever unsure about the position, rotation, and size of certain objects you can always reference the exact numbers I used in my project seen in the images.

Add or duplicate another cylinder into the scene. Shrink the cylinder and position it at the bottom left of the body. I found its easier to move scene view at an angle to make it easier to line the leg up accordingly. Change its material to a orange material, which I copied the exact properties from the yellow material but changed it to orange.

Duplicate the left leg and position this new cylinder in the rightward direction, creating our right leg. Now is the time to use a fun quirk that Womp3D has, the Goop feature. This features allows us to weld and fuse two objects into each other. For each of the legs, we will set the Goop to 1.34, which makes our legs appear molded into the body.

Select either leg and duplicate it. Shrink the object and position it so that it is the right arm of the robot. Reapply a Goop of 1.34 and do the same for the left arm. Our robot now has legs and arms!

Upon a closer look, I realized the Instructable Robot had a noticeable belly. We can add this to our model by adding a sphere to our scene and shrinking it. I applied the same yellow material from before and positioned the sphere so that it clips into the body but sticks out just enough. The key is to set the sphere's Goop to 3.61, which makes it appear much more natural.

Add a cube into the scene, shrink it, and position it above and center of the body. Give it the same orange material and clip the cube into the body slightly. Apply a Goop around 3.2 to weld your robot head into the body.

Each eye is made up of two parts, the red eye socket and the inner yellow eye ball. For the right eye, add a small cylinder to the scene and give it a red material by duplicating and changing the yellow material. Position it and rotate it such that the circle area is visible. I ended up not using Goop on this red eye object and instead simply clipped it into the head. For the eyeball, duplicate the red eye socket and shrink it even more and make it orange. Once its center, you can simply duplicate and position everything to the left for the left eye!

We can take a shortcut with the ears since we have our eye sockets from the previous step. Simply duplicate an eye socket cylinder, rotate it, and position it to the side of the head. Repeat the same thing for the other ear too.

The Instructable Robot features antenna looking rods sticking out the ears. To achieve this, I did a unique solution. In the object panel, add Text into the scene. For our text, all we want is a single "-". By sizing the text and elongating it, we can create these rod-like antenna from just text. Position it to stick out the ears and once your done with one side, duplicate and position it for the other side.

This is where things get a little tricky. In the object panel add the "S-Shaped" object into the scene. In the left menu, you will see various Points in the object. Delete all of them except the first five to achieve our smile shape. Duplicate a previous material and change it to a black color. Apply this material and shrink the object and position it as the mouth for our robot.

Now its time to add some details. Add a cube to the scene and resize it so that it rests on the belly. You can use the default material since it is gray. Apply a Goop of 3.61 to the object to weld it on the belly.

Add a sphere into the scene and resize and position so that it is above and center of the metal plate. Duplicate and shift two other orbs to the right and left of the center orb.

As our final touch, duplicate those same orbs and move them to the bottom of each leg, Resize them accordingly and apply a Goop of 1 to each. Now that our Robot is complete, be sure to name each object accordingly if you haven't already, and double check to make sure you have each component.

Now its time for bubbles. Add a sphere into the scene and add a new material. You can copy the exact properties I used for the material, but be sure Translucency is maxed out. Resize the bubble so it is slightly smaller than the robot and rest the robot on the bubble. When doing rotations and movements to the entire robot, make sure each component of the robot is selected.

Duplicate a bunch of bubbles into the scene of various sizes. Once your satisfied, spread them out across the scene.

For stop motion, we will need many different images for our frames. You can get creative with this, but I began with the robot on the large bubble starting below the ocean and emerging from there. Once you have your scene, select the camera tab in the top right, click Export Image, and export the entire scene. A tip for your frames: don't just have the robot riding on the bubble move. Have the background bubbles and ocean move too by slightly changing their position each frame. It is time consuming, but it does create a better final product. One extra thing I did was have the bubbles disappear one by one by changing the visibility. I also made use of rotations for the robot. I have attached various frames that ended up in the final video of mine. Get creative with it and gather at least 20+ frames.

With your downloaded frames, head on to Konvertor and upload them. Make sure the naming of each frame is sequentially numbered at the end, such as 1 2 3 or 01 02 03. The numbering doesn't have to start at one, my first frame had a ending number of 32 and it counted up from there. The FPS I used was 8, but you can use a different one. When your done, download your video.

If your final video felt a bit too zoomed out like mine, you can use the Video Cropper tool from 123Apps and resize your video. Download your finished video and enjoy your 3D modeled floating stop motion animation!