What you see here is called the Robotic Arm. The robotic arm you see in the video is demonstrating the Tower of Hanoi. It’s a puzzle where you must sort the tiles on the other side, the bigger tile is unable to touch the bottom tile but for my video the blue tile cannot touch the red tile.

The process is that I made the Robotic Arm in both AutoCAD and Inventor. For me, Inventor took much less time than AutoCAD did because it was easy to make any changes with the Inventor model than the AutoCAD model. After it was made in Inventor, I added the platform and the tiles for the Robotic Arm.

Once it was in 3ds max I used bones to rig the model for movement, used what's call the Reaction Manager for the sliding tube can move up and down to grab the tiles to sort them as well as the Vacuum Cup to slightly morph when picking up a tile and morph back to its original position when its let go.