giant robot comedy WIP

#22

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.

#23

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…

#24

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?

#25

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

#26

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… :slight_smile:

Or something like that… :slight_smile:

#27

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?

#28

incredible! you will make the dragons right? :smiley:

#29

wow excellent work how can I crit this :smiley: …keep going :wip:

#30

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 :slight_smile: 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 :slight_smile:

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 :wink:

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.

#31

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!

#32

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?

#33

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

#34

yeah I agree with glenn23 it would be very cool

#35

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

#36

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

#37

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 :slight_smile:

#38

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 :slight_smile:

 just for laughs, this is the very first version of the concept sketch: 
 
 [img]http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/robort_line.jpg[/img]

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 :slight_smile: the line art was also made in PS. i wish 3d would get as fluid and easy as working with ps…

[img]http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/sincity1.jpg[/img]
#39

made a few last extremely small tweaks, i have rendered this out at 7000 pixels wide to submit to expose also :slight_smile: 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?

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.

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:

#40

have the heads pretty much underway…

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.

#41

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.