The Marble Machine X is a machine built by Martin Molin which is a musician, producer and self-taught engineer.

The Marble machine is a music instrument capable of playing sound with marbles. It was engineered to be programmable and live playable on stage.

Martin documents the amazing process on his YouTube channel: Wintergatan.

This is his most famous video showing the first version of the machine:

Discord server

Martin started to build an online community centered around the MMX on a Discord server.

There were dozens of threads talking about different subjects concerning the machine: design, engineering, CAD, music and rendering!

There wasn't any render of the entire machine so I asked if I could work on it, the answer was positive!

Process

The CAD team did a wonderful job on the 3d modeling of the machine and it was open to download on Martin's website as OBJ and STL files.

The model was brought in Blender and I started to clean the geometry and separate parts.

A big part of the process was to make shaders and assign parts to the correct material.

Adding bolts and missing parts was also necessary to make it more realistic.

Here is a high quality render of the final texturing:

Animations

For the video needs and with the help of the amazing render farm team, we managed to render 4K animations of the MMX.

They were featured on a Wintergatan episode which I am so proud of!