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.

The Story

I won't give too much away, but Wire Cutters is the story of 2 robots finding each other on a toxic planet. They're part of separate mining operations but figure out that they can utilize each other's skills to make a higher yield. This, of course, doesn't go totally according to plan. I think the final product will have a strong universal message.

One of my storyboards

Developing the story has been one of the most challenging but rewarding things I've ever done. I've been storyboarding since January and have done 3 total revisions and drawn well over 2,000 storyboards. There's no dialogue and since my characters are robots I really can't default to easy human expressions. This means that every last blink or camera move is completely critical for effectively telling the story. It has made development incredibly difficult but has really progressed me as a filmmaker.

Another storyboard

One of my biggest priorities was keeping all my elements as simple as possible. I only have 2 characters and a handful of props and my environment is basically a flat desert. this (hopefully) means I can spend more time on each of these elements to make them the best they can be.

Running time is about 7 minutes.


A quick note on storyboarding:

I'm not a particularly good drawer so I was a little worried about conveying my beats through storyboards. I figured if I was drawing from scratch it would be inefficient, I would have poor staging, and it wouldn't be very clear. To combat this, I rigged up some quick models of my character designs in Maya and applied a toon shader. I then brought those images into photoshop and drew quickly drew over the environment and details on the characters.

In the end I was really happy with this workflow. It allowed me to stage more cinematically and was very fast.

Toon Shaded Version Maya

Final Board

Welcome!

I'm currently making a CG animated short film to act as my thesis in digital arts at Chapman University-Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. The story has been in development since January and I've been in full blown production since September. It's going to be an insane amount of work to finish by May.

One of my test renderings of a prop.

 I'm hoping this blog can show my progress for people interested in the project as well as provide technical insights on the various elements of production. I'm planning specific posts in the future where I can take time to focus on all aspects of making this happen.

I really shouldn't be posting these so early, but I'm just starting to block in the textures on one of my characters.