R33GTR - TRANSFORMER - PAGE 4
Well although I wont get to upload this till I'm back home in England, I thought I'd get around to typing this little addition up now whilst I'm sat relaxing in the garden... in Barcelona! Although I haven't actually been working on my pc much whilst over here mainly due to spending most of the week swimming in the sea, I have actually gotten a fair amount of work done on this project. Initially i was only going to have the car transform into a robot then have it grab the camera. But then I thought it would be fun to have it transform back whilst the camera is lay on the floor and have the whole 30 second clip more like a Sector7 classified footage clip similar to the Mars Lunar rover landing clip in Michael Bay's Transformers! Getting the robot back to the car was actually a bit easier than I thought it would be, and I took a leaf out of ILM's book and made the transformation effective from the camera angle we see it at making certain pieces slot into position in order and other bits rotate into place. I then had the car wheel spin away which I quite like because the wheels start spinning before the transformation is complete so it looks like its on its way before its finished lol. I've added a heap of smoke and dust elements in and headlights glows too. I also changed the landscape mainly because the outside landscape wasn't too effective or moody. Secondly, the carpark lot was more like how I originally envisioned the piece anyway. I'm really glad I went with this route now though - it feels alot darker, claustrophic and renders alot nicer too! I need to redo the robots head, and also add some cars in the background too along with some dirt and grime on the other walls but overall I'm really happy with how its looking so far. I've put up a few basic rendered stills, and also a non-rendered version of the animation with all the composited elements on it below. Its quite mad to look back at the project as a whole and see how its progressed. It initially started out as a simple car model and now its become all this and other stuff in between lol! Click on the image below to view the Qtime movie (approx 10mb)
Just a quick update for today - spent most of the afternoon working on the head. I used some reference from Ben Proctors artwork slightly, and worked lots of shapes into the head I had. I quite like the eye design on the head. I was quite pleased to hear that it 'looks like an insect head' which is partly what I wanted to get a feel of with it so thats good. I modelled the head in a blank scene, did some basic underlighting with it then pulled it into my scene and did some shading tweaks. I'm quite pleased with going the extra mile to do this extra bit of modelling as its literally transformed *smirk* the project and how the robot looks and it feels quite similar to the ones in the Michael Bay movies I think now :) Just need to add one more detail really - the hand that falls in front of the camera. This wont be a dismembered hand - just a 3d hand that is going to drop in the foreground and give the feel that the cameraman was killed or something and in the process of being mauled he's lost the camera but then when his body falls to the floor we see his hand drop into shot. I think this will really help the last part of the shot personally so will work on that tomorrow hopefully :)
well after about 6-7 weeks of evenings working on this I think I can say at last that its finished! I've modelled up the high res head which I have to say was definitely worth it and I've modelled up an arm for the end of the shot which is meant to be the cameraman! Bit macabre maybe but it certainly enhances the shot thats for sure! Its a bit of a shame that it hides the transformation at the end, but I prefer it as an overall piece so I'm going to keep it in shot. I'm quite getting used to these lengthy projects now and I'm looking forward to returning to some of the others I've done and finishing them off. The final movie res is 900 x 506 which is about as large as my laptop would let me batch render without keeling over! It took about 4 days to get the main render passes out and a fair few evenings comping them together. The next bit to add is audio but for the time being I'm gonna pop it up on my site till I add the sound then I'll update this movie. Click on the image below to view the Qtime movie (approx 10mb)
