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E3: Greenscreen Exercise (15/10/2020)
Assignment 1: Motion Capture Preparation - Character Development
Our first Assignment focused on creating an original character, rigging it and applying our own motion capture to it.
The theme for the character was Mecha. The character had to be mechanical in some way, from full on robot, to human with mechanical parts, like a cyborg, the only condition being that it had to posses human proportions, so that the motion capture would function properly. I decided on creating a Robot, as it simplifies a few steps in the modelling and rigging process and because I like the robot designs I was inspired by.
After creating and rigging our character, we were tasked with posing them dynamically, with 5 poses minimum being required.
My main inspiration was this Ruin Guard design from Genshin Impact.
I really liked the loose and segmented design it has, with a bulky and heavy top.
Other designs I was inspired by were these two, The character Revenant, from Apex Legends and a Loader Bot, from Borderlands 2.
Apart from the general design which I like and took some ideas from, they have a very striking and distinct shape and silhouette.
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This was the design I ended up with.
Keep in mind, this hasn't been properly textured yet, but the colours are a good placeholder, though the final product might not look even similar to it.
Each piece was modelled separately, to allow them to move more freely and independently. In most cases, parts are connected to a metallic sphere, which fits into a slot on another connecting piece.
This is an easy to model and animate method of creating a robotic character. The only time when this technique wasn't used was for the Knees, which bend with a large hinge.
Dynamic Posing
Idle Pose
Defeated Pose
Yeehaw Pose
Resting Pose
As the character is obviously very square in it's design, doing dynamic and lively poses was a bit challenging.
The sphere and slot connections between the parts gave me a lot of freedom to bend the limbs in dynamic ways.
Shredding Pose
Assignment 2: Motion Capture Scene
Our final assignment for this subject was to follow-up on the previous one and make improvements to it, specifically, create a RIG able to follow Motion Capture (or MoCap) Data and, optionally, change the model to add more detail and potentially increase our marks.
Along with both of these changes, we had to create an environment to use as the background to our new project. This background could be anything, though we were encouraged to use pre-made models from Bridge, a software specializing in gathering collections of 3D objects, textures and more.
One of these collections was a set of Mining equipment, vehicles and structures, which inspired the changes that I'd later make to my Mecha character.
Although I ran into plenty of issues with the Material Attributes and had to make many quick fixes to the environment which lowered the general quality of it's look, I still feel like it's a good looking background to my Mecha, which, as I've mentioned before, was inspired by the setting it would inhabit.
When I pictured a robot in a mine, I imagined an old, worn and dirty machine, with faulty lights and antiquated looking technology, like batteries and power boxes, on top of large and heavy robotic parts.
While I wasn't aiming for a realistically functioning Mecha miner design, I wanted to add a good number of details to the design, like dirty cloths, clothing and damage on the helmet, and a general dirty and rusting look. Some cartoony design aspects like the quad pants were too important to remove.
While I had ideas for the previous Mecha design, coming up and imagining what this design could look like was too interesting to not try and create myself.
Many of the textures were found on multiple websites, like Pinterest, Polygon and Google. The majority of these were clean metals, leather and cloth, so I used customized brushes in Photoshop to add multiple kinds of dirtiness, like dirt, oil stains and rust.
Other details and close-ups will be visible bellow.
Connecting the model to the MoCap data used was surprisingly troublesome, due to the "anatomy" of the model. Enlarged shoulders and generally inhuman looking models tend to have issues with MoCap data meant for normal human characters, but it mostly worked in the end, meaning that the issues encountered with this data came more so from the creation of the data itself, not how it was used in this project.
As shown above, the movements and positioning of the limbs is completely crooked, leaving the model looking very silly, or very offensive if looked at from a certain perspective.
Although this was a common issue in other projects in our class, it still heavily affects the look of the final animation. But, as this was impossible to fix, the project had to keep going as normal.
In the end, the model was placed in the environment and the final render was done. I have to thank my fellow classmate Lorena Neagoe, who helped with the motion capture and final rendering of this project.
Unfortunately, to add to the other issues plaguing this project, the final render suffered unexpected issues with the environments materials on most assets, giving them a very shiny look. Due to nearing deadlines, this couldn't be fixed in time, so the issue remained to the end.