Some actual animation!!!

Time to put some life into this...thing.

Below is the Mental Ray look; took three hours and made my lap-top do an impression of a George Foreman grill, and that was without knocking the background out of focus. So I did the Mental Ray movie render (only 80 frames of animation) on some of the Uni machines last week.

Mental Ray rendered version.

Below is a render using software. Still looks pretty good, and I can see the animation but it really lacks the beams of light turning in the background.

Software Version

Nothing fancy, just straight ahead animation and I have not played with the curves via the graph editor yet.

Looking at the lighting in the Mental Ray version the beams are more distracting than expected so I am going to slow them down a lot and make them less visible.

More soon, including the guy with the big hands!!

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

In a moment of madness I dusted down the old Diesel Robots mechanical hands and gave them to the Mark II robot; Massive Holographic hands with Thirty Eight working pistons!!!

I never got them rigged before so it is great to have them done at last.

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

[Yes, I know its ironic that a robot with no actual working joints has half visible magic hands that have tons of working pistons that they do not need (because they are holographic hands).]

But hey, that's just artistic license!!! And it looks great. Mind you, the five 1/2 hour render time for one frame is a bit steep. The laptops fan sounded like it was going to take off. I may have to try our chunky PC's in the green-screen room for this one.

Rigged Pistons galore!