Thanks Shuggs. I’m definitely trying to give him personality and an Ernie Borgnine-esque character.
Here’s an animation update:
Nomad: Arms, Legs, Rig, Guns, animation test
P.S. It’s got lots of problems right now (mostly rig popping and speed issues). View it in High Quality.
i agree, i like the looks of your transformer. i Hope that i can get my to look as solid as yours is. any tips on designing the head?
Hey Jay, I’ve seen yours and the Saturn looks sweet. When I went about designing the head I kind of studied the concept art for the film. Initial head designs were very ninja or samurai inspired. The heads themselves looked like masks. As the film concepts plugged along it became pretty obvious that they wanted to make the good guy’s faces more human or mammal like. (Iron hide totally has a cow face). Just look for something in the automotive anatomy that might humanize your dude. The Chevy’s oil drip pan just works perfectly as a beard.
Alright, I’ve started shader work and lighting setups for Nomad. There’s very limited painted texturing going on right now. I’m considering a couple different color options that I’ll render and have people pick as the best color option. Also there is a new grill (which when animated looks very cool, all Driven Key).
It has issues right now with this hyper reflective Blinn. It looks like a couple of the leg parts have shifted slightly and the gaps are obvious. I’ll try and find a way to fix that without pulling and snapping points, but I’m running low on time.
This week I’m working on color, simple texturing, and I intend to finish modeling chrome accents and glass frames.
blue is really the collor u used during to whole project…kinda belongs to it. but i really like the red also…no matter which u use it will be amazing =)
Hi there.
I must say that i like all 3 different tipes of color options but i think u should stick with the blue one which u started with.The model is amazing and so is the transformation.I realy can’t w8 for next update.:bounce:
Blue. I have yet to see a Transformer owning that color. It’s a brilliant-type of blue and I think it fits the personality type of the character more. That and I’ve enjoyed seeing the color on him throughout the updates. Stick with blue. 
SantoAnderson - just checking on your stuffs outside of the dsf - omg your model renders are sweet man! - and the tranformation animations on youtube look amazing!!
far out this is gonna look awesome - great stuff
Thanks Embryotic,
Yeah, I need to get back on this project. I’m in the middle of changing apartments, and when I start in on this project I am a hermit for days. I guess the final color will have two options: blue and white, or blue and wood paneling. There will be an update in two weeks.
Yo Santo, the Nomad is really looking amazing! How did you do the sectioning of the body panels if I can ask? Like do you have a flush solid piece and a bunch of sectioned pieces that you go back and forth and key the visibility on? Or do you just have the idividual pieces so flush you can’t see any seams? Sorry if it’s a dumb question, just really had me wondering haha. Thanks.
Crap, I totally spaced the update. The last render job was too much for my MAC, so I’m moving everything over to the PC.
Ngan: The sectioning has the simplest explanation. I built the car panel and split the pieces manually. I extract the pieces, and then re-combine the meshes without merging edges. Extrude the combined mesh, and re-separate the pieces. It’s like clockwork. Though you need to save an unanimated version of those pieces, hidden somewhere, because all these constraints will easily ruin it’s initial frozen position if something decides to screw up. The divisions happen thanks to a combination of basic keyframing, multi parent constraints, and driven keys, all of which are attached to a basic skeleton.
Wilexx: Lots of patience and no social life. 
I just need to get this bizness finished so I can go on to other projects. I’m so close, and my machine dies… crap…
Updating from my cell (phone, not prison):
Color Render
Will give more information when I get to a terminal.
Fracking Ay man:thumbsup:
That's looks amazing very good update!
this project must have been taken a lot of patience to take this at the point where it is right now..heh
Like i have said before this thread deserves all it’s*****stars and i just dont get it why it have only ****stars:argh:
Wow…not sure what else to say. Great freak’n job.
Did you ever find the speckle paint you were looking for?
Well as much as I wish that it was over… it’s not. This render is a basic Maya software render with some basic shadows and reflection. Nothin’ too fancy. It took about three days to render along with a depth pass. It has a couple basic textures, but I’m wanting to rust it up a little bit on the interior of some paneling along with inventing some automotive geometry to attach to the inside of the colored panels, because he still looks a little to toy like.
Why’d it take so long? It keeps crashing my machine mid-render. Now you’d think it’d be easy to restart the render from the crashed frame, but the rig starts growing a mind of it’s own come render time. The IK for some reason will twist 1 or 2 degrees if I start rendering a sequence half way through the scene. So when I finally compile the image sequence in After Effects it looks like he’s twitching. You can even see some pieces twitching in this composite because of a mid render crash. So I’ve been trying to render this scene for two weeks, and it kept on crashing on me. I just had to keep restarting until I came to this… which looks relatively okay.
I’m going to do a mental ray render next, with a different, hopefully longer, animation. It’ll be much prettier, as I actually intend to spend time in post, include occlusion passes, separate shadow passes and realistic shaders. But my little MacBook Pro is getting old; I think it’s trying to commit suicide. My computer bag fell out of my Jeep yesterday, putting a big dent in the corner of my laptop. So yes, I think it wants to kill itself. So think of this as the final playblast, and the next video as the final render.
Now, the second reason this project has taken more than a year? It all has to do with a conversation I had with a former Pixar rep about preparing a demo reel. This was in about January of this year. I asked him what kind of content I should include and what I should avoid. He told me to avoid, and I kid you not, creating material from or based upon an established property or franchise, shiny cars, or robots. So I’m there thinking with Nomad I’ve basically combined all three big No Nos into one singular project. That day I basically put Nomad on the back burner, changing him from an everyday project to a weekend project. I’ve been working very hard on my artsy fartsy demo reel that Pixar will fall in love with… that Nomad won’t make it into. He’ll make it into my technical animation reel though.
Have you tried using a render farm? You don’t necessarily need, top of line computers for that, only their processing power.