Portal Marble Run
A few weeks ago while I was in the midst of the Marbleous Adventures Kickstarter I had an idea for another marble run. This one would feature a new mechanic that made it look like a marble was being transported from one doorway to another instantaneously, as if via a portal.
Here’s a bit of the design process for it.
First, a lot of sketching, and trying to think about what will be happening inside the model to create the illusion. Essentially, whenever a marble is lifted to be dropped into the portal, another marble needs to be lifted to be dropped out of it.
My first attempt at modeling this idea was super complicated. I wanted to try to put as many features as possible into it, but it left me a little burned out and disinterested in the design for a bit. The challenge in designing a marble run like this is that most of the moving parts exist out of view, and figuring out ways to sleight of hand all of those components is super challenging. I might return to this more complex version one day, but in the meantime I wanted to go for something a bit simpler if that meant it could be more elegant.
After a bit of time away from the project, I returned to model a much simpler version. This one would only have one pair of portals, and one button to control them. Here’s the first pass of the design:
Though this design still had a couple of sizing and tolerance issues, I was able to get the portal illusion to work pretty nicely.
So I’ve gone ahead and fixed up the model, added a couple more embellishments, and now I’m printing out the final version. Fingers crossed this one works more reliably!
