Regal Rexnord Bucket Elevator - 3D Animation

in late 2023 we began to work with Regal Rexnord, a large American manufacturer of motors and power transmission components who had purchased Altra, one of our previous clients. Regal was impressed by our work, and decided to work with the company as a global marketing partner. The first project I landed from them was to work on a animation of a bucket elevator initially started by a freelance 3D designer. The animation would feature the elevator first in motion, then zooming in and highlighting a set of specific pieces in sequence before resuming motion.

I took the 3D files left over and converted everything over to our Octane workflow, recreating materials & lighting from scratch to recreate the look from the previous artist, managing to send out first proofs for the highlighted pieces as well as a rough preview of the overall animation. The motion of the chain required the use of wire parameters to connect the flow of the chain & buckets to the rotation of the flywheel at the correct rate. The way the scene was left made this difficult to achieve quickly and unfortunately, due to very strict time constraints, the animation was dropped mid-way through. That said, I still rendered out the animation after the project was completed despite this to add to our showreel for visiting clients.

This project also included some still renders of additional equipment related to the chain, which Regal were able to acquire final renders of.