Full video coming here very soon!
Years with badly behaved children and other charity shop toys pushed this robot over the edge. He will not stop until every other toy, and possibly naughty child, have been destroyed.
Figure I & II: Raw plate & final composite
This project was an individual assignment that required demonstrating of rigging, dynamics & expressions within Maya to a 3D model. I tweaked the brief to include compositing also. If I’m going to spend time on a project then it may as well be relevant to my specialised subject.
Process
Concept
I wanted the project to be fun and childish and what better way then toys. So I did a sketch, below, which let’s face it is fantastic.
Figure III: Initial Sketch & final model
I wanted the toy to look battle warm, twisted and evil. I wasn’t keen on him walking, but rather blasting upward with his unstable jet pack. I used lots of red and yellow as danger warning colours. Parts of him are damaged and have been ripped off. As for his arm, I made multiple types of weapon fists that are shown below in figure IV.
Figure IV: Chainsaw, suction cup, cannon and boxing glove designs
Modelling
I identified that modelling isn’t my strongest attribute. Giving the amount of time and extra compositing I was doing, I decided to keep it simple. I bared this in mind when coming up with the concept design for the robot. While modelling I considered keeping things low poly and simple. Most of the parts are primary shapes with smoothed corners. I inserted an edge loop around the model to fillet the edges.
Texturing
Basic modelling makes texturing simpler. I used Mental Ray shaders (Mia_X_Passes) because of the rendering passes capability. I tweaked the plastic preset to get the desired look. A bump map was used of to add a bit of depth to the plastic shape. I used a grey scaled image of scratches as a matte for the reflectivity as well, to make it appear like its gloss coat was damaged. I like to get colours quite intense and then bring it down in post.
You may notice I also changed the plastic body from original gun metal colour to a black. This is because I felt it more typical in making it look ‘evil’, especially with the red. Because I rendered in passes I could change it if necessary without rerendering.
Figure V: Screen shot of set recreation within Maya
As you can see from the wire mesh image above, the reflection rig only needs to be simple. In fact, I’ve used too many polygons in this example. It needed to be in place due to the highly reflective nature of the model. Recreating the room also means the robot is at the right perspective and position to the camera.
Rigging
As the project was about rigging and dynamics, I’ll go into detail about it.
Figure VI: Arm rig within Maya
Firstly the models are placed within correct groups in a hierarchy. For example, all the components of the forearm are placed in the same group. This group is then placed within the whole arm group. I used joints on the groups and controlled them all with an IK handle. The IK handle gave one point for the animator to controlled the complete arm, shown in figure VI.
The second part of the arm is the hydraulics. Essentially two cylinders (but placed in groups so more parts could be added) are told to always point at each other. I used a measure tool between the arm and shoulder. This measurement controlled the Y scale of top cylinder group. When the arm contracts, the cylinder shrinks to stop it popping through the back.
The arm joins the body with a series of connecting cogs. Now, I told the first cog to have the negative rotation of the arm. So if the arm moved 20 degrees clockwise, the cog moved 20 degrees in the anti-clockwise. The next cog then had the opposite of that cog, and so on. If a cog was half the size of the cog before it, it would move twice as fast (multiplying the rotation by 2). Simple.
As for the animations I used a lot of expressions. Generally, this involved rotation added by the time, which creates a looping animation. I animated him to twitch and wobble to make him appear dangerous and out of control.
Compositing
Originally I composited with After Effects but later learned the error of my ways and converted to a nodal way of life. To understand the nodal process better I recreated it within Fusion. This allowed me to find all the relevant tools and tricks that I already knew from After Effects. And personally, I’ll never composite in After Effects again. Nodes just win. So I’ll break this down from a nodal point of view.
Figure VII: Final Fusion flow
You may notice from the raw shot and the final I scaled the footage up slightly. I shot at 1080p and delivered the final render at 720p (over scanned). This gave me room to increase the scale without quality loss. I did this so I could have control over the composition and add a camera shake in post. Adding camera shakes after removes the need to match move or motion track and generally save a lot of time. It often avoids a lot of rotoscoping also.
I input the flow into a 3D plane, merged with a 3D camera, within Fusion (shown below). With this I can rotate the camera and create a camera shake. When you rotate the point of view, in this case the camera, there is no parallax. This means everything stays in line, all in the same relative position. So a rotation can simulate realistic shake without anyone noticing. I used some script to animate the camera, which produced natural movement and was quicker.
Figure VIII: Camera shake
Finally I colour corrected the whole composition. For this project I colour corrected each section individually. All the toy soldiers, each wall, floor and robot had their own correction. All the toys had different shades of greens and most of these were too dark. I lowered the contrast and gamma and increased the saturation in different amount to make them all level. As for the environment, I slightly desaturated and lowered the brightness in less important areas. Lastly I reduced a lot of the yellow tint on the raw footage and made it blue.
Leave a comment below and thanks for reading.
- Credit
- Liam Major Filming, Modelling, Texturing, Rigging & Compositing
- Software
- Autodesk Maya 3D modelling, texturing & animation
- Eyeon Fusion Compositing & CG environment
- Client
- Bolton University Dynamics & Motion 2 assignment
- Duration
- 8 weeks (during 2 other projects)
vfked0d
30 Jul, 5 o′clock
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Liam Major
31 Jul, 8 o′clock
Yes
Wordpress Themes
2 Aug, 1 o′clock
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the_eight
3 Aug, 3 o′clock
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