giant robot comedy WIP

[tweetytunes]

sorry dont know where you would get it made but I really like this although It seems stuck in the middle of beening a gaint robot and a comedy robot. The private parts and gun with the silly scope and guitar are cool, but apart from that ..... err missing something to be called a comedy robot.

I would add more comedy elerment is what I`m tring to get at.

But again love the modlering, the look and the style on it
keep it up

[aeres]

I suppose its a parody of those Gundams with giant guns and air vents? if so then you have done a fine job :thumbsup:

[iNcurSioN]

its supposed to be a medium scale plastic toy model similar to the perfect grade gundam kits.

I think that answers your question :P

Very nice job man, I love the comedy in that :D funny stuff ^^ very detailed too, must of taken a while to model.

[doctorgonzo]

Thats absolutly hilarious, but excellent work!

The guitar bit looks a bit out of place. But all n all its great!

Doctorgonzo

[yenvalmar]

in context i think it will be a bit more funny, maybe. i think david lynch and terry gilliam are funny though, its not going to be disney obviously :) also at this point i havent modelled his pet 7 headed hydra/chinese dragon hybrid yet.

thanks for the compliments, i have really been pushing myself on this project due in part to the quality of work i see on these foums every day. this has been a spare time project for months now, i fit it in between commercial jobs and occasionally hangin out with my gf.. but probably it would have gone a lot faster if i had started it in maya 7, i LOVE the new poly tools. all told its probably about 120 hours of work to get to this point, including the rig which has a lot more than needed just for this pose, tis gonna be animated as well. with a project like this i find it actually helps a lot to take time away from it for a while, then come back.. i'm always noticing some little thing i can improve when i look at it with fresh eyes.

[gunslingerblack]

you can get this made into a sculpture by using a service, ( i forgot the name of it right now but as soon as i remember i'll post it) you send them ur model and they give u a price for reproduction and then they send it to u and u can paint it up.

[mijaba]

you should look at a plastic extrusion company with a rapid prototyping machine. It cuts a block of plastic with lasers into an object. It's like a 3D printer combined with a CnC router. You'll probably have to convert the file into another format and break the model into practical sized chunks (as I don't know how they'd cut into areas occluded by other parts) Talk to a pro.

[yenvalmar]

showing a bit of the articulation and that its rigged..

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/WIPrig1.jpg

[mijaba]

quick question, where does he holster his gun when he's not shooting it or playing guitar?

Last question, shouldn't his amplifier be as ridiculously huge as his gun? I mean skyscraper sized marshall stacks-- with LED indicators, banks and banks of dials and faders, and maybe a hydraulic stabilizing sytem (like legs or something)- just a thought.

Looks awesome.

[yenvalmar]

you know, i think he has to just carry his gun around, or not, depending on what is called for in todays episode :)

as to the amp, i just felt it was better to exaggerate it in the opposite direction of all the guns and crap, and have it just be a little (though, if the robot was full size, still bigger than a person is tall) practice amp..

also this is just the base model of the robot, he has a whole lot of extra crap which can stick onto his back, somewhat along the lines of

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/robort_color4.jpg

which is why i posted this to the WIP.. i have the wings and all the stuff attatched to them roughed in, still refining it to the level of the pieces in this render, still havent started on the hydra though.

hopefully the amp is going to just tumble along after him, as if being pulled by the cord, using dynamics, then always somehow magically come to a stop out front facing up when he needs to rock out. the cord is already rigged with dynamics to connect it from the gun to the amp, one of the many things i have to play with is how to figure out the rest.. yay

[mijaba]

that's just insane. I can't wait to see this one done. Truely nutty.

[whatauva]

this is wild man, that robot is what all mercenary or elvis fan would love to get for X-mas.
:buttrock:
that gumdan is really lock and loaded......... :thumbsup:

[aeres]

I can already imagine the recoil force of all the guns firing in unison will rip the mecha apart, then scatter the bits 100 km in all directions.

[Greenhalls]

A very crazy idea, but also VERY COOL!!!
i love the detail you added. I wonder, what hand should be handling the other end when it plays guitar. LOL.
Lemme see, it is combined from Gun and car machinary,electric guitar,classic piano,Amplifier Artilery machine,Air battleship, classic riflle (from MOHAA maybe) 4 shiva's hands, Aladin's + cowboy's shoes and gears, samurai??,dragons??(is that a six headed dragon??:surprised cool) and even COOKING UTENSILS??(held by one of the shiva's hand) :eek: i wonder, will it use apron too when cook?
looking at your design is just like playing games finding something in hidden in the pictures. LOL

JEEZZZ!! YOU ROCKKK!!:buttrock:you deserve a reward... really...... :deal:
cant wait for the finished work :bowdown:

[rkrehe20]

hahaha that is awesome. the addition of the guitar made my day. this is going to be my new background

[yenvalmar]

the comments are really encouraging. i wanted to make something you could look at for a long time, since it takes me a long time to make anything worth looking at :)

this is the roughed in state of the mesh on the wings, i'm still adding all the little details and making it smooth propely. i like to rough in the volumes of an entire section and work out the proportions and whatever design i need to improvise from the 2d sketch, before getting too anal with all the bevels and so on. i dont even look at it smoothed till faily late in the process for these sort of mechanical forms.

also since its really a complete model on its own, i made the x-1 that hangs under the wing as a separate file, which i may well use other places as well :) i did manage to restrain myself from fully detailing the interior. only so many hours in a day.

[yenvalmar]

working on the back piece too. this was almost entirely obscured in the concept sketch, but since i am my own client on this piece as it were, i did not bother to do a detailed sketch of that area, just built it right in the 3d.. i already had a good idea of what i wanted, generally i hate to design in 3d though, i feel like you waste days in pointless noodling.. or at least i do ;) going for a chinese temple on top of a roman/egytian facade, in gold of course.

a bit about my process in maya- every big subsystem is modelled in a separate scene, rigged, and referenced into a master rig file where they are stuck together, for example the gun, backpiece, wings, and robot are separate, then in the master rig they are constrained together. this is to keep file sizes down, more than anything else. also since there are so many pieces, smooth poly proxy sucks, so i have a custom attribute on my rig drive the smooth attribute of regular smooth poly nodes, linked up via a cool script someone on highend helped with, as there are several hundred objects, though you could do it with the connection editor by hand.. this way there are not needless duplicate geometry, and i can turn the smooth value down before i save it to keep file size down / speed up the scene loads.

[yenvalmar]

working on the wings

rig test animation (http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/wingrig_v8.avi)

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/wingwip1.JPG

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/wingwip2.JPG

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/wingwip3.JPG

[yenvalmar]

i wasnt able to find a way to automatically mirror the complete rig, and probably wasted more time trying.. anyways its all working now, i was able to mirror the geometry, the controlls, and the joints, so that did save time, but not preserve any of the parenting or constraints, so that all had to be re done by hand, which was a bit time consuming but not the worst thing i've ever had to do :)

both wings test animation (http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/wingrig_v14.avi)

another (http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/wingrig_v15.avi)

as you can see every animatable control is a spline curve, for ease of selection and display controll. it also makes it easier to set up trax characters etc, basically the only downside is it takes time to rig, especially for something like this with a lot of little parts. but even for poses, it begins to pay off in time saved in production very quickly.

each of the spline curves is constraining joints, which in turn have the geometry parented to it. since it doesnt have to deform i didnt bother to bind it, but i never ever animate geometry directly. by using a joint skeleton, i get two layers which have to screw up before i totally lose all my animation, animations can be baked to joint rotation for those final tweaks etc, and i can edit the mesh till the end of time without worrying about the animation and vica versa.:)

the rig of the hydraulic joints and so on is mostly automatic but i havent worked all the bugs out so it flips around at certain positions, which i dont think it will encounter, but you never really know whats gonna happen once you start animating so.. grr.

[yenvalmar]

first crappy test render, clearly a lot of work to go on the surfaces but everythings holding together on the referenced rig files so far, which is always a concern.

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/masret2.JPG

i really couldnt sleep untill i messed around a bit in photoshop to make it look more like a cheesy calendar photo of a harley davidson... and now.. goodnight..

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/masret3.JPG

[jjcoolio]

Wow, Man, that's one hell of a modeling job. The only thing that was weird was the eyes in the first post you made. I think the eyes are too close..I hope I'm wrong.

[yenvalmar]

i think if it was to look really _good_ the eyes should maybe be a bit farther apart. it looks a bit stupid and crosseyed but that doesnt really hurt what i am going for here.. but maybe i'll tweak that..once i start animating though i plan for this guy to have really bad aim despite all the firepower, so i may want that.. lots of collateral damage along the lines of team america.

as i post this im waiting for another render to finish. its addictive. i'm having a little problem with the alpha leaving a black halo, which is especially noticeable on the cord and the wings in the first render before i put the highlights over top, but i've just been doing quick comps in photoshop, i will try bringing the footage into afterFX as that has more controls for dealing with mattes, then once i get that sorted back into psd to add grain, tweak the levels and blow out the highlights, i am really enjoying the cheesy motorcycle calendar feel so i'm going to keep on with that for now.

well, that worked a lot better, you can see the matte line is not as bad this time..

http://www.yenvalmar.com//nonprofit/theory/karma/images/masret4.JPG

[cohesion]

Wow, that is really coming along. The modeling work is excellent, from what I've seen. The rig seems fairly solid and workable. Great work. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product eventually.

Just one quick question, though. That amp... does it go up to 11?

[tweetytunes]

i take it all back this is looking as funny as hell. I`m loving it
it looks so cool keep up the good work

[boxcrash]

ROFL.

This is awesome, its so funny and thats about it for all the guns and stuff.
Can't wait to see the finished product, you should have him fight another one that is super junky made up of scrap parts, or hundreds or thousands of them made of scrap parts, or something like that.

Then spend like 30 seconds of the animation or a 2 minutes or so charging up and arranging weapons, and make all the robots coming at him, like cut from scene weapons readying and charging to them coming at speed, then back to charging, then to hord at speed, charging, hord, charging, hord, charging.............and then make the blast take out everything and some planets and send him hurling into hyper drive in reverse......... :)

Or something like that............. :)

[Favian001]

yeeess! I definately think this is a great piece. Funny but with serious modeling and rigging methods. What more could you ask for? I personally think that the small amp is cool but I was actaully thinking it would be great if the intakes were speakers. That would rocccckk!! The "lollipop guild" shoes are great and of course the mighty cannon makes him that more "macho". Cant wait to see the end result...hey is that a Les Paul or Fender Stratacaster for the guitar?

[devailo]

incredible! you will make the dragons right? :D

[thebest]

wow excellent work how can I crit this :D .......keep going :wip:

[yenvalmar]

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/bw2.JPG

i got a little abstract with the renders, also i wanted to get up close to show off some of the detailing. thats enough fun and now back to modelling.. i still need to finish the back piece and do the dragon but i may take a bit of time off of futher modelling work to start doing effects for the gun and maybe some other stuff for the bigger project.. it helps to avoid burnout and come back to it fresh sometimes..

thanks for all the comments i will try to reply to them all:

first, the "funny but with serious methods" comment made me very happy, as that is really what i want to get across. not even funny per se, i mean i am going for comedy because its the easiest thing to do, but just using 3d in the cool ass slick looking way that all of us here on these forums looove :) for something other than what you would ever possibly see in a commercial production. no offense to any of that stuff, its what i do for a living. but i feel like i have all this knowledge thats underused in a creative sense by my day job. so i'm doing a comedy. is a gundam with a dick better use of cg than the latest action blockbuster? hmm. well thats why its art :)

yes, i do plan to make the dragon/hydra, i hope to use displacement mapping for the scales and other detail but retain the stylized design, so its more like a living sculpture than a plausible organic creature, if you follow me.

as far as animated clips, this project is going to be more about still renders than animation just due to time, but i do hope to do a cheesy power up/demo sequence sort of like you were talking about, much as they do in the real animes with these robots. as to blowing up the universe, i like your thinking, but i'll see if i have time ;)

the guitar is based on a les paul, yes. almost all the design details are refereced from real objects, or pre-existing designs in the case of the giant robot itself. its supposed to be sort of a collage, but of course all smoothed over and integrated into the final thing.. but just about everything in there you could find some reference for, either conceptually such as the shoes, or the design detail itself, like the wing flaps which are based on a 747, the guns reference the gun in the a-10 warthog and huey cobra helicopters, blah blah a real list would take pages though it might make for a fun game of concentration..

i think that last render needs tumbleweeds going by, and canyons in the background.. its supposed to have a western feel. maybe a cow. i have a feeling i'm going to wind up putting a cow in here, its just almost inevitable once giant robots come in, that cows get involved. but maybe later!

the monochroming effect, grain, adjusting levels, depth of field via z-buffer, and highlight blooms, were done in photoshop and afterFX.

i'm using a dome light setup with mapped shadows, and then raytraced area lights for the ground and sun light, the combination makes me pretty happy as mixing the two types seems to somewhat hide the shorcomings of each. the render times are only 10-20 mins a frame on my machine, which is a 3800+ athlon with a meager 2 gigs ram.. i'm sure the renders can look even better, but most of my rendering experience has been in short form video animation, or games, so i have never had time to learn hdri and mental ray and all that coolness.. but i already know regular lights so i am just going with it. but i would welcome comments on that as well, and certainly any comments on how to further improve results with the techniques i'm using, rather than "oh just use HDRI mental ray etc", would be most appreciated. i'm hoping to get things into that pixary zone, not that i want it to look exactly like pixar, but where consistently a style is established that is just far enough from photoreality that you get a bit of slack, but realistic and subtle enough to make even a sphere and a box on a plane have visual interest.



http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/BW1.JPG


http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/bw3.JPG

[glenn23]

I kept smiling as I looked at all the details until I got to the amplifier. That's drop dead hilarious! I can see it in the store with a little button on the amp "Try me"
Great!

[yenvalmar]

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/low_wings.JPG

thats a great idea, when i get the real sculpture of this made i'll have to see how much more work it would be to rig up a button on the amp to actually play something.. i'm thinking it could transmit wirelessly to a sound system that the art installation will need already to trigger the sound, rather than trying to actually build it into the gundam.. thats just beyond my scope.

and now the question... what does it play?

[glenn23]

They used to make christmas cards that you could record a crappy sounding message on a chip. Maybe you could find one of them.

[thebest]

yeah I agree with glenn23 it would be very cool

[boxcrash]

Are those spinners?
The wheels, if they are ROFL, thats great.

[decipleofX]

lol I like the fact that his cock is a gattling gun

[yenvalmar]

Are those spinners?
The wheels, if they are ROFL, thats great.

you cant really see em spin till i start animating.. glad somebody still noticed though. nothing gets past people on these forums, good _or_ bad.

and yes, glad somebody mentioned the cock. i realize its sort of making it impossible for this work to be taken seriously, but i can't argue with my stupid muse. maybe if i could exchange it...

as i post this, i'm rendering out at 7,000 pix wide to print, ultimately i intend these renders for print .. pretty apprehensive about that as i have not worked directly with printing stuff out and its gonna cost 20 bucks a shot to experiment :)

[yenvalmar]

i hope the final piece does as well. glad people are enjoying it. i realize its sort of silly and all but its the first thing i've really done without worrying about commercial constraints in a long time, feels good :)

just for laughs, this is the very first version of the concept sketch:

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/robort_line.jpg

and a really cheesy test of non-photorealistic rendering style. i do want to pursue this direction further, this was a super rough hack on an old version of the model before i finished the wings.. though i think the simpler mesh works well with this render style, i may use the unsmoothed mesh for these. i made it by doing some photoshopping to the specularity pass of a normal render. like i said, hack :) the line art was also made in PS. i wish 3d would get as fluid and easy as working with ps..

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/sincity1.jpg

[yenvalmar]

made a few last extremely small tweaks, i have rendered this out at 7000 pixels wide to submit to expose also :) hopefully i'll finish the rest of the piece but i think this is far enough that if you dont know the whole concept it may be considered a completed work. you guys think?

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/low_wings_final.JPG

mainly i reposed his lower left arm to be more symmetrical, which also revealed the skull and crossbones belt buckle that i am very happy with how it turned out, so yay.

http://www.gasolinealleyantiques.com/kits/images/CarMiscellaneous/tamiya-6wheeler.JPG

i wanted this to have the feel of one of those very detailed airbrush paintings, rather than real photorealism, like one of these tamiya model kit box covers. but for the scale to be almost architectural, or monumental. like a painting of a building. but a building that looks like a plastic toy. so its all nutty! so if all that comes across, bonus points..

heres a full res detail:

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/low_wings_detail.JPG

[yenvalmar]

have the heads pretty much underway..

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/headWIP_smooth.JPG

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/headWIP_wire.JPG

not sure how i'm going to do the scales, normal mapping or what.. still have to experiment. any suggestions would be most welcome. i want it to look like a carved sculpture or plastic toy, not like real scales.

[Teratron]

You could try displacemnt for the scales, Just make a B&W textue and use Mental Rays micro triangel dissplacement, Works well in 3ds max but not sure about Maya. Also depending on the size and style of the scales normal maps wouldent be a bad Idea but just remember it still looks flat around the sides.

Anyway Mad props for all this, you have a great sence of humer, and some mad skills. Great work and keep it up.

[stuh505]

Hey man, I love the transformer but I think you could improve the materials a little bit. The flat diffuse coloration isn't doing it for me. Either some glossy specular carpaint or maybe even a toon shader with bright white highlights would really push this piece up a notch I think.

edit: one more thing, I really liked the top view of the Guitar but unfortunately all we can see is the bottom view from this angle (and this angle does have better composition), but it's a shame I think because the top looks nice

[yenvalmar]

i decided to try the straight grayscale displacement map, since i'm a dumb artist at heart i try th easy way first.. this is the result with no other work on the shader and default lighting. it took a bit of tweaking of the values in the map and shader to avoid nasty artifacts but at this point i'm really happy with it EXCEPT it takes FOREVER to render and maya runs out of memory after a couple renders. mental ray just plain craps out and renders but with most of the displacement not showing up.. i think i need more than 2 gigs ram. i am using one 1024 x 1024 map tiled for the displacement, and feature based displacement, on a nurbs surface... any tips on this would be appreciated, i dont think i can take these render times. looks pretty nice tho, very close to what i had envisioned with not much tweaking.

i'm also wrestling with the rig, i've tried a number of things but nothing is quite there yet.. again any advice much appreciated. i want it to be very flexible, like in the concept sketch, able to twist around at any point, but have very specific twist controll all along the length. spline IK might be ok for the necks but the body requires more controll.. maybe a few spline IKs in a row with higher level controls to move the whole thing. gotta play around but i'd love any time savers :)

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/testr.jpg

as far as comments on the surfacing, thats very WIP, i feel like i may go with a more plasticy surface in the end but i hear ya, its just defaults on the robot still :) i definitely want to do more with toon and other NPR shading as well.

here we have a quick test of scale and to see if the rig can acheive the pose from the sketch. although it actually looks worse than the other test, it represents a lot more work, as they are posed with an animation rig, not sculpted.. i just cant force myself to pose characters directly past the most early stages, i know if i put a rig in i'll wind up thanking myself later. the snake neck rig is so close to working amazingly well, yet so not actually working good enough yet. if i get it to work i'll post a tutorial but i have a feeling it just cant be so simple. boy is it looking promising though. this is a bullshit proof of concept rig using about half as many joints and controlls as i plan to actually use, and it looks like thatll just about do the trick. and its going to be so easy to animate with, i may just do an animation to show it off :) :) :) if i can fix these few last issues.. sigh. the sort of seemingly little ones that sometimes take months. i've had this happen before.






http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/TheLongNightOfrigging.jpg

rig animation test: this cracks me up. i had the idea to make it so that each head and neck was a separate guy like a snake.. thinking about if it was a boss in a game. had to go re do some stuff but here it is: each of them is now a separate character that can pull off the main body and go about their own business, or they can follow it as one character, via set driven keyed constraits.

rig test animation (http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/dragon_v20_rigtest.avi)

[yenvalmar]

well, i may have, but i went in a different direction with the dragon rig. re did everything based on what i learned from that other test and i'm pretty darn happy with how its working out. this is a totally invertebrate rig, no bones :) all wire deformers. this render is completely posed via animation controlls, nothing "cheated".

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/integrate_v1.JPG

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/integrate_rearv1.jpg
now that i know the dragon's gonna work i have the mental energy i need to push through and finish the modelling on the back geo and extra details, so im gonna try to do that beforre i have to work for money some more.

[yenvalmar]

its "done".. phew!

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/integrate_v2.JPG

and further evidence of my own.. whatever, i thought the render layer of the back part sort of worked on its own here:

http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/science/images/science2.jpg

[devailo]

man it looks sweet. and with the dragon.....uuuh it kicks ass. But i dont like the human looking dragon. really

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