MRRGMDDN: p2b

Final Video

The final video is available to watch on Youtube at the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMZa2x3FF6A

Playblasts

These are a couple of playblasts demonstrating the use of CV curves to animate motion. I used CV curves with many of much of my animation and also with a few camera shots.

Animating and Camera Techniques

One of the most important aspects of my animation was the use and control of cameras and camera angles. Because I was dealing with the constrictions of a grid environment I had to find ways of making simple shots into interesting shots. I used a lot of motion paths and angles to show the size of the environment compared to Hector. He was always supposed to be a tiny robot in a large city and I think these stills show that nicely.

I had to use back lighting for this shot to illuminate Hector's back so it was visible.

A nice shot showing Hector's head lights spilling light over the opposing building. The bump map on the gravel looks really nice when under the head lights.

Bump mapping on gravel shows a nice lighting effect.

Chase scene of the lights of the Seeker interacting with the lamp lights. The lights on the Seeker are actually just simple polygonal spheres that have intense glow special effects whilst hiding the object itself only the glow will be visible. However I had to parent a low level ambient light to the Seeker in order to illuminate it enough to be detailed. The Seeker is supposed to be a sleek glossy white and it was difficult showing this colour in a night time setting, a lot of tweaking had to be done to the lighting in these scenes.

Building the Environment

The environment is essentially a few blocks of streets within what can be assumed a much larger city. My biggest challenge was making believable light. The way I found a solution to this was to line the streets with glowing lamp bulbs and have them cast large amounts of light on the street below. This had a great effect with my characters lights when combined.

This is a wire frame of the skyscrapers. Each was made individually and are all completely unique in size, windows, stores and unique corner edges.

This is mock render of what a single light bulb can illuminate. The entire lighting effect of the animation was achieved with the use of mental rays real sun and sky lighting. By rotating the angle of the sun towards the sky it engages a night time lighting. I had to change the settings in order to achieve a light enough colour so that other lights and detail could be achieved. I used this technique to alter the detail visible in each scene.

My character within a scene

Simply constructed final scene. The final scene is were our friend Hector gets thrown into this vat machine like thing and instantly gets converted into a power cell.

This is the scene where Hector is caught in some sort of tractor beam by the Seeker and gets sucked into its holding cell.

This is an edited shot of Hector in his power cell form. A sad boring power cell. We can see him frown as he is rolled away in the final shot.

Character Modelling, Rigging and Texturing

This is the basic mesh for my character. Rigging was a reasonably simple job, with his arms and neck being the only things to have any amount of movement worth rigging and binding to skin. His eyes and chest were always going to have a high glow material on them to act as computer screens and such. They also proved a very useful source of lighting in many of the scenes. Lighting was key in my animation as it was set at night so the luminescence of my scene and character had to be the same in every shot and also believable.