Animating a drone

🚀 Designing & Animating a Drone: My CAD Coursework Project 🎮✈️

As part of my fourth-year coursework in Industrial CAD Applications, I took on the challenge of designing and animating a quadcopter drone from scratch. Sounds cool, right? Here’s how it went! 👇

The Mission: Build a Drone… Virtually!

The goal was to create a 3D model of a quadcopter using Autodesk Inventor, ensuring every component—from the motors to the telemetry module—was as close to real-world specs as possible. The structure was also optimized for 3D printing, so theoretically, this little guy could take off in real life! 🛠️🛸

Bringing It to Life 🎬

After modeling, I moved the design into Autodesk 3ds Max to animate it in a simulated environment. This part wasn’t without its headaches—textures vanished, materials needed reworking, and let’s just say the first few flight attempts were… unstable. 😅 But after some tweaking, I got a smooth animation that showcased the drone in action, dodging obstacles like a pro.

The Final Result: Watch It in Action! 🎥🔥

Rather than just talking about it, let me show you! Here’s the final animation of the drone in motion, featuring a mechanical breakdown and flight sequences. Let me know what you think! 👇👇

Lessons Learned 🔍

This project was a deep dive into CAD modeling, animation, and problem-solving—from structural design to overcoming software quirks. Plus, wrapping it all up with a rendered video in Da Vinci Resolve (with a killer soundtrack 🎵) was the cherry on top!