Wow, that is really coming along. The modeling work is excellent, from what Iāve seen. The rig seems fairly solid and workable. Great work. Iām looking forward to seeing the finished product eventually.
Just one quick question, though. That ampā¦ does it go up to 11?
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
ROFL.
This is awesome, its so funny and thats about it for all the guns and stuff.
Canāt 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, chargingā¦and then make the blast take out everything and some planets and send him hurling into hyper drive in reverseā¦ 
Or something like thatā¦
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 ālollipop guildā shoes are great and of course the mighty cannon makes him that more āmachoā. Cant wait to see the end resultā¦hey is that a Les Paul or Fender Stratacaster for the guitar?
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 modellingā¦ 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 projectā¦ it helps to avoid burnout and come back to it fresh sometimesā¦
thanks for all the comments i will try to reply to them all:
first, the āfunny but with serious methodsā 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 iām 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 iāll 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 thingā¦ 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 concentrationā¦
i think that last render needs tumbleweeds going by, and canyons in the backgroundā¦ its supposed to have a western feel. maybe a cow. i have a feeling iām 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.
iām 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 ramā¦ iām 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 coolnessā¦ 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 iām using, rather than āoh just use HDRI mental ray etcā, would be most appreciated. iām 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.
I kept smiling as I looked at all the details until I got to the amplifier. Thatās drop dead hilarious! I can see it in the store with a little button on the amp āTry meā
Great!
thats a great idea, when i get the real sculpture of this made iāll have to see how much more work it would be to rig up a button on the amp to actually play somethingā¦ iām 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 gundamā¦ thats just beyond my scope.
and now the questionā¦ what does it play?
They used to make christmas cards that you could record a crappy sounding message on a chip. Maybe you could find one of them.
you cant really see em spin till i start animatingā¦ 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 canāt argue with my stupid muse. maybe if i could exchange itā¦
as i post this, iām rendering out at 7,000 pix wide to print, ultimately i intend these renders for print ā¦ pretty apprehensive about that as i have not worked directly with printing stuff out and its gonna cost 20 bucks a shot to experiment
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 iāve 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:
[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 wingsā¦ 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 psā¦
[img]http://www.yenvalmar.com/nonprofit/theory/karma/images/sincity1.jpg[/img]made a few last extremely small tweaks, i have rendered this out at 7000 pixels wide to submit to expose also hopefully iāll 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 pointsā¦
heres a full res detail:
have the heads pretty much underwayā¦
not sure how iām going to do the scales, normal mapping or whatā¦ 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.
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.
Hey man, I love the transformer but I think you could improve the materials a little bit. The flat diffuse coloration isnāt 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 itās a shame I think because the top looks nice
i decided to try the straight grayscale displacement map, since iām a dumb artist at heart i try th easy way firstā¦ 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 iām 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 upā¦ 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 surfaceā¦ 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.
iām also wrestling with the rig, iāve tried a number of things but nothing is quite there yetā¦ 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 controllā¦ maybe a few spline IKs in a row with higher level controls to move the whole thing. gotta play around but iād love any time savers
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 sculptedā¦ i just cant force myself to pose characters directly past the most early stages, i know if i put a rig in iāll 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 iāll 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 issuesā¦ sigh. the sort of seemingly little ones that sometimes take months. iāve had this happen before.
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 snakeā¦ 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.