Rigged STRANDBEEST blend file based on Theo Jansen's genius kinetic sculpture inventions

Animate a STRANDBEEST using only 2 controls. Made in Blender v.3.6.2

The handle control can be rotated in either direction to move the limbs, and the root bone can be moved to animate position. By trial and error you can adjust the rotations to get the feet to not slide. If you ease in or out of the location with the root bone you would need to ease in or out of the limb movement rotation to match.

To add a STRANDBEEST to your Blender file click file-append (when in your file you want to add it to) then navigate to the JansenStrandbeestONLY.blend file and further to collection and then to the collection called STRANDBEEST and only then APPEND.

Once the STRANDBEEST collection is inside your file, you can see inside the STRANDBEEST collection there are 2 armatures. Ignore armature 2 (it's set to copy the 2 controls on armature 1).

Click on 'armature' in the outliner. You should see a vertical stick among other things. Click it to make sure the armature is highlighted and change to pose mode. That's your rotation control.

The horizontal stick is the location control. I like to keyframe that first.

The rotation control works best when you are facing the side view of the STRANDBEEST. Twirl it either way like a clock hand to make the legs move and keyframe them.

If you don't see the vertical stick once the armature is highlighted, check that the second layer slot is highlighted in the object data properties (the little running man symbol in the properties panel underneath the Outliner).

You can of course append multiple collections and have fun modifying and duplicating and all that fun stuff.

This strandbeest is powered by magic, wheras in reality it would be driven by external factors such as wind blowing into a sail, or a motor driving the crank.

Check out Theo Jansen's YouTube channel (theo jansen).

I pretty much copied the rig from Blender Tutorial - Theo Jansen Mechanism 3D Animation

Executive Quest (channel) and then tweaked it a bit for the controls.

Have fun!