Fixed lights and a Vimeo link.

Here's the next render, with fixes;

• The fans that create moving light beams from above and behind have been slowed down considerably to become atmospheric rather that distracting.
• Fans lights are not as bright.
• The three point lighting is all fixed; different levels on the Key and Fill, and more Rim light have pulled the character out of the darkness considerably.

See the Vimeo link below for a good video version...

https://vimeo.com/175533791

Tweeked lights

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!!

CGI January 2016 update; character dynamic pose tests.

Here are some gesture drawing style poses for the two robots. I am now just trying the rigs out to see how they perform and what sort of poses suit each machine.

The Mark II below is clearly readable in more dynamic poses as planned and is pretty flexible with mesh overlapping anywhere.

Mark II bot

Mark II bot

The Mark I is more cumbersome with the tech on its back. This was obviously always meant to be the more basic / primitive robot and is less inclined to hit broad dynamic poses.

 Also; twisting the waist too much will make the geometry on its back overlap some other areas.

Mark I bot

Mark I bot

Looking at the robots now I can see that a lot of their design has to have come from the robot Hector in Saturn 3, an old sci-film from 1980 starring Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas and a young Harvey Keitel. The screenplay was by Martin Amis from a story by John Barry.

This bot made quite an impact on me when I was 14 and I still like the eyes-on-a-mech-arm instead of a head look. The robot was huge so the actor had his arms inside the torso. This allowed for more realistic robot arms on the costume, another nice touch.

Follow the link below for the full film on You Tube. Well worth a look and the robot is still creepy!!

Hector from Saturn 3


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc4R3SOif0g

CGI December 2015: quick update

It's been a long time since I put up any new images of my robots here but they are still progressing.

After a long break; where I was too basically busy to work on them, I have given everything a big overhaul. New story, same characters. The environment is now way simpler, with the same animated beams of light.



The characters stand out more without all that unnecessary clutter. The robots have had some of the gaps in their body parts filled in with extra geometry. This should improve their silhouettes greatly and the robots are sporting a cool black and yellow colour scheme.

Test animation will be rendered without the fancy lighting as it is inclined to make my computers fan sound like a jumbo jet taking off. It is also rather slooooooooooow!

More soon time permitting.