DWIV - 3D - kittyfufu- CRYBORG

#1

Here’s the latest state of things, Original post follows

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Hello everyone,

Ok, I know there’s not a lot of time left, but I simply refuse to miss out on Dominance War, yet again. Unfortunately this year, I was very ill for the beginning of the contest and after that, on top of being busy at work, life just always seemed to get in the way of me sitting down and figuring out something to do. Although I’ve just now started to produce some concept sketches, I have thought about what it is that I wanted to tackle – and what I could do to approach things in a fairly non-standard way. Here’s the first set of sketches:

Being so late in the game, I’m not going to have the time to really visually establish some of the higher concept things that I wanted to do with this model; namely making it more than just a model, I wanted to up the challenge and make it for lack of a better term – literary.

Not that anyone is probably interested, but if you’d like to know more about the thought process, I’ll be happy to go over it with you.

The more major points:

I wanted to break the mold – most cyborgs are depicted like variations of the Terminator, basically imitations of a human on the outside
metal men on the inside with the ubiquitous red glowing eyes – if only someone were to break off half of their face. Well, I first thought, cyborgs are always depicted as one whole creature with robot parts
but no one ever said this had to be, so what if they were more like Frankenstein’s monster and made up of many people. Ok, and then I thought, why not have cyborgs made up of more than just humans
hence the sheep shanks.

Part of my design was also geared at doing things that I hadn’t done before – so this would be used to give me an excuse to try something new – namely the inclusion of a toddler and a farm animal. I know that the forum and contest didn’t want to include anything too racy or too gory, but I still wanted to construct a character that looked odd and a bit disturbing. Being that the Machines are the ultimate bad guys, I thought it appropriate to represent the cyborg as having a toddler for a brain – to be ruled by only its id. This cyborg is a mechanical nightmare in a permanent state of tantrum, which exists only to get what it wants
only to destroy.

There’s much more to all of this, but as it is, I’ll be lucky to spend even 40 hours on this from beginning to end, so I’ll save the rest of the blabber for later. Wish me luck.

-Thomas

#2

Sure you’re late dude… But good luck anyway. :slight_smile:

Love the toddler for brain, really nice idea, but i’m not convinced by the sheep part. Maybe something that looks more agressive, and espacially a creature that could walk with a lot of weight charge.

Cheers :wink:

#3

Ohhhhhhhhh HELL! Good to see you jump on board. I really like the concept… I just hope you can get it finished in time. This thing would be a beast in 3d. Good luck man!

#4

Ok, so things are going a tad slow - me being glued to the tube watching the Carolina Vs. Boston hockey series and all… but here’s an update on work. Did some digging for reference on 2 to 3 year olds and put together a rough front and side view template to both model from and later use as a texture projection. Also included is the base mesh for the brains of the mechanical beast.

I haven’t decided just yet how much detail I want on the base mesh. Depending on how easy or difficult it is to get a good likeness to the templates, I may resort to modleing much of this in mudbox and then trying to down-res to a “game art” tri count mesh. I choose the toddler in part because I haven’t done a kid yet and this is supposed to be a personal challange to learn from. I may have been stupid! ha. I’ll post progress when I know which way works best.

#5

Ok, here’s the updated all quads “brain” mesh pretty much ready for working in Mudbox. The plan is to make the brain have some expression and be rather asymmetrical. I’m sure when I start messing with it, I’ll probably find some parts that need refinement. I’m not worried about the ears - They are omitted as the skull is cut open and mounted into the mechanical head unit. I’ll pose the body in the head assembly with the head cocked back exposing what will more than likely be a longer neck - I may or may not include a trache tube. Its inclusion will give me a natural seem to mirror the body and make the human component of the cyborg seem more corrupted by the machine. But we’ll see. So far the mesh is at 1092 tris, which is not bad. Final game art will be reduced by a fair amount as I won’t be concerned about preserving more or less “Equalized quads”. Anywho… this is it so far.

-Thomas

#6

After a few delays and other obligations, I’ve finally taken a pass on refining the toddler mesh. the purpose was to see if I could get a fairly close expression to the one on the template. Also, I’m using the level 0 of this file as the new base mesh - which will be carved up to stick this kid into the head unit of the machine. My plan is to build the final model in its final pose, as i don’t have a lot of time to build skeletons, etc… hence I’ll be cutting up everything and placing instances in rotated positions - this way I can improve the model’s jesture. Although not perfect, I’m pretty pleased with the model. I figure not bad for about @5 hours worth of work. My friend stopped by as commented on how much fun it was to make babies… to which I said making babies is, modeling them is not! Just kidding… this is a really good challange. Hopefuly the final product will be more on the spot.

#7

Hello from a fellow East Carolinian!

That is one ticked off baby. Your mudbox skills are great.

Good luck.

#8

Looking great man! The crazy thing is, you knocked that out in only a couple of hours. I’m waiting to see those reverse arms :thumbsup:

#9

Being that I didn’t get started until really late in the game, I can’t afford many setbacks… so of course I’ve fallen to a touch of Murphy’s law. I spent half a day beating my head on the wall trying to put together a base mesh for the head and body of the CryBorg… and they just weren’t doing it for me. I still like elements from my initial sketch - albeit rather loose, but realized that I needed to take a few more stabs at it.

I won’t say that this sketch is any more refined, but it helped me realize that I needed to rethink some of the articulations and worry more about the thorax arch and head shape. From that, I feel like I’ve gotten a bit more on track and did a more refined side template / arms template for the head and main body:

Although I’m really tempted to just plunge on, I need to grab some sleep for work tomorrow. Hopefully, I can rough out the remaining body meshes sometime tomorrow.

While I’m at it, Sorry for not saying so earlier, but thanks for your comments guys.

Abrvpt, thanks for the well wishes and the feedback. As I stated before, the creature was conceived as a bit of an allegory, and part of that is served by the Sheep shanks - plus I like that it looks really off and not particularly stable. It’s supposed to to a degree… but you’re point is noted and I’ll hopefully get it to look like the sheep is at least trying to cope with the rest of the machine that its apart of.

primativ, hey, hey… E, C… you look so good to me! Yes, it’s always good to run into a fellow pirate - and on here to boot… Cool! Thanks for the compliment. I won’t say that I’m all that great with mudbox, but it is a quick program to be sure. Hopefully when I get the toddler UVWed and textured he’ll really come off. Right now I think it’s serviceable, but not quite how I wish it were. Oh well, just need to keep plugging away.

#10

Ok, I feel like I’m back on track today, despite losing a fair amount of time watching the hockey game and letting a friend spend time on my computer to get some things done. As I said earlier, the other day I had struggled putting together a set of base meshes for the body of the CryBorg model… today I’ve roughed in a fair number of the parts and spent a goodly amount of time looking into the kinds of articulations I wanted on the joints. I don’t get much opportunity to work on mechanical things and the time it took shows.

The arms were built off of the drawings (in the background) and built in segments so that I could just make sure the pivots were set in the correct locations of the joints and then just link everything together to check mobility, etc. I’ve been a little unsure about how much detail I could put into this thing, so it was important to build as much as possible and get rough counts quickly. I’m feeling pretty good about where I am now. I think another day and I should be able to UVW everything.

I’ve instanced all the components for the limbs at flat angles so generating the normals for sculpted elements, etc… should be pretty easy. The Sheep parts of the model are not posed yet. I’m waiting to set the UVs before setting the feet in an open gate. One last note, I’m debating modifying the “hands”. The left one, I’m pretty set that it will be a hammer with a rudimentary 2 finger hand with opposing thumb. The Right was going to be a combo gun and whirling sickle. I’m thinking about maybe just simplifying it to just a single big sickle. I may make both and see what people think as to which or the other.

#11

I was going to post this earlier, but with the Carolina Vs Boston game 7 raging on the other day… I didn’t get around to it. After getting most of the big components set for the body of the Cryborg I realized that the main part of the thorax was really plain looking, and with the volume of Tris I still have available, I thought I would dress things up a bit. I made a paintover and then upped the tri count on the thorax to give me a little more shape to work with. I temp UVWed the thorax and then DeepPainted the paintover directly to the meshes surface. That way I was able to just trace out the geometry without a lot of fuss.

#12

I have finally had a chance to buckle down and attack this monster and am almost done with the modeling. What’s left to be done now is down to makind the weaponized hands. I was thinking of having a combo gun, sickle contraption, but now will probably just have a giant sickle by itself. We’ll see. I’m also not sure if I want to add on a shield for the arm as well. I will figure that one out shortly. As it stands now - I’m almost at the 10k tris mark. Granted, there’s much of this model which is still unrefined and can be easily held in check. Luckily, UVWing this should be fairly simple. Now on with the hands.

#13

Hi Thomas,

That’s a deeply unsettling model - and I mean that as a compliment! :slight_smile: It’s a highly original idea, and I really hope that you manage to get it finished by the deadline. Best of luck

#14

Things haven’t been going all that smoothly here in the home stretch. My band played Saturday, and that cut down on a lot of work time… and now the greatest problem I’m having is just trying not to fall asleep. I had hoped to have a good pass on most all things, but now its looking like I’m going to have to forgo some of the nicer elements if I want this done on time. Still, I’m pressing on and hopefully, there will be enough here to be worth while. To quote Man On Fire… I wish you had more time! ha. Serves me right.

Surrealix, thanks for the compliment and the luck… I’ll need a lot of that. I’m still hoping to have this finished. the modeling and mapping is the slow part. Texturing and mudboxing are where I’m a bit quicker. Hopefully… REALLY quicker!

#15

well, despite putting in almost 2 full days strait without any more than about 2 hours of sleep, I couldn’t pull it off. Honestly, I thought I could, but I just got too tired and a bit bogged down when it came to assembling the UVs and then building the diffuse. Oh, well… I am a bit sad that I couldn’t pull it off, but I’m also pretty proud of myself. I’ve managed to go from drawings, to models and all the fun in between in just under about 100 hours of work. I think if I had two more days, I’d have the beyond polished. In my case, I had forgotten that I didn’t have the weekend all to myself to finish work, and lost some momentum. Alas. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with what I came up with and I’ll be sure to finish it when I have some more time. Hopefully next year, I can dedicate the entirety of the competitions time to working on a cool character.

Well, here’s a look at where I’m at so far:

And here’s the model in his action pose

I’m not sure what will happen with these threads now that the contest is over, but I’ll try to finish this off soon and post the results if any of you are interested.

Thanks for keeping tabs and thanks for the kind words along the way.
-Thomas

#16

[left]Sorry you didn’t finished but you have a good design direction ! Maybe you can finish this model, but i think it should be great to improve the design, the shape of each parts, but always with this baby as brain.

Keep it up mate !
[/left]

#17

Given the weeks worth of time you had to do it, and even if you didn’t get to where you wanted it, this is still very impressive.

#18

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