Daft Punk Robot Heads project
I've decided to do a little project that I hope may turn into a bit of cool character animation. I've always been a huge fan of Daft Punk. Their musical ability is nothing short of amazing. I always liked their use of the robots as their personas too - I decided it'd be fun to model them up and maybe do some cool animation with them too if I can get the time. I quite like this image below as the bike leather look kinda really sets off the robot heads so I may do something very akin to this myself. Animation wise I'm not really sure what to do but I guess I could have alot of fun with them on the decks or dancefloor or just do a few nice renders but we'll see what grows from it :) Hopefully as well they wont shout at me for making them in 3d lol!
First up... modelling the heads lol! Here's a few screenshots of it so far..
Okay so I've done a little bit more this evening - modelled the detail in the ear area and the wiring on the back on the head. All of it fairly simple to do really...
and with some basic shaders reflecting a hdri map this is how it looks so far..
...one thing missing though and thats the little led's in the head. To this I dupliceated the inner mesh of the head and smoothed it twice to get lots of subdivisions. I then made it a Goal in maya and the resulting particles as cloud spheres. Once that was done I assigned a particle shader to the particleShape and tweaked it till it looked relatively led-like :) The last shot below shows the led's up close and you can see they're quite feathery which can also be easily adjusted. The thing I like about them is the glass reflection over the top of them still shows up which is cool :)
...Below is a reference image of the heads, overall I dont think mine is a million miles away if I can fine tune some details then I should be onto something quite convincing. I also sussed out a nice bit of animation for the robots to do as well - its nothing majorly clever - probably just rotoscoping some video footage of dancers but its a kinda funky bodypopping style that'll work a treat :)
...So thats where I stand so far. the next step will be some tweaking of the model, shader adjustment and sussing out a method to allow the particles to turn on or off based on say an animated texture in afx! eeeek!
I decided to start re-working my methods on this LED-screen on the face. I couldn't get the particles to inherit the colour for love nor money unfortunately. So in the end I did it the old fashioned way - polys lol! I wanted spheres to all share one animated texture so I manually snapped spheres to a flat polyplane! This was a monotonous task that I would have loved to mel script, but having not had enough practise I just couldn't write it fast enough so I thought sod it and just snapped them myself manually... surprising how quick you can do this with 750 spheres....
...once that was done I combined the spheres, assigned a planar projection to all of them and tweaked the uvs till they laid out neatly. I setup the grid in the uv editor as 15 subdivisions first and moved the uvs in columns so that each column sat in a grid subdivision. I then did the same for the rows. My mesh that originally formed the screen is 15 subdivisions across by 25 wide. In the uv editor you can see that each sphere lines up vertically with one space on the grid...
...ok... so spheres made, texture uv's assigned, just need to move them into position against the actual shape of the helmet and align them to that mesh... once again manual method ftw! I did a separate on the combined spheres, centred their pivots and snapped each one to the mesh. Then I ran a normal constraint to align them with the bent/curved surface. You can see this better in the image above actually...
...next I had to create a texture. This actually doesn't need to be very big at all I found. In fact in the image below they are actually scaled up 400% so the images are tiny! This should be a blast to animate in pshop or afx lol! These images are actually only 15pixels by 25pixels so each sphere neatly gets one pixels colour! Any multiple of those numbers can make me a neatly matching texture so 30x50 or 60x100 pixel textures will not cause any issues with the leds.
...and this is the original size I did them in pshop...
...with my tiny-textures created I can now assign them to the LEDs...
...and rendered out they come out like so...
...so pretty good progress so far - I think next step will be doing an animated texture for the face and then a test render animation to see how it all comes together in motion :)