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I am fully animated! Somehow I was able to chug through 8 1/2 minutes of animation over the last four month and still finish a month ahead of schedule! Animation isn't really my specialty but I definitely think it is all very readable and really grew to love doing it.

I now have a little over a month to premiere so I'm refining animation, rendering, and of course working with sound and music.

Animating...Rendering...Animating...Rendering

Haven't posted in a while. I'm 1/3 done animating! Render times right now are between 6 and 30 mins so I'm happy. Here are some stills for now. When I get some time I will post on some of my setups for the dynamics in the project.

Environment and props

As of last week I started animating! Here's just a couple images of some of the other assets.

This is what the gems looks like

I call this a "hopper". Basically it is where gems are dispensed. 

My environment has pebbles (frozen instanced particles), small rocks, boulders, and landmark sized rocks. I'll just move the landmarks and boulders around for new locations because everything is a flat environment. 

I can get close enough to the ground and still maintain the quality I need. I had a really hard time making a terrain that looked natural but was also light on the render times. After trying everything, I ended up justing using a normals map. It work OK, but my render times are low so I'm happy.

This is a parachute kite thingy that is also a solar panel.

More character texturing

Almost wrapped on the texturing of my second robot. 

Little Character Rig

Just finished up the final touches on this rig. This is pretty much all done by Katelyn Roland, a really great rigger at my school. All and all, I'm very happy that I have 2 reliable rigs that will make everything from here really smooth.

This is just showing how each joint can move.



Here's a couple to test poses. I'm happy with the level of expression so far.

Texturing Characters

I'm pretty much done texturing this character. About half of the geometry has custom textures while the rest is tiled (running out of time!). I'm pretty happy with the final result. Everything was made basically from scratch in Mudbox. I was originally trying to use stock images of metal but I ended up having more control to just paint it all by hand. I'm using metal ray materials with color, spec, and normals. 

I'm going to make a post specifically going into making the eyes later, but it took quite some time to figure out how to make something readable yet realistic. I want every part of them to have a purpose and a story instead of having parts of their body be there just for readability reasons.

Hope you like it! Ideally I will be done building assets in 2 weeks so that I can have a ton of time for animation. 

Mechanical Robot Rigging

I spent the last day working on a rig for one of my characters. He doesn't have a ton of movement, but it took a little bit of problem solving to make the hydraulics and wires follow everything. I worked off a new Digital Tutors tutorial for making the treads which I'm hoping will be able to automatically conform to my terrain.

Take a look at the rig!

I'm also finishing up textures. I'll have a full post later once it is done.