Mechanical Arms - how I put it together - PAGE 1
Heres a breakdown of the stuff wanted to do with this project...
The initial idea developed from my love of Digital Domain's Mechanical Legs advert for Adidas... I loved the lighting, the modelling, the audio, the editing and the fact that it still managed to advertise a product clearly too. I didn't have a product to advertise but thought I'd have a go at doing a similar kind of animation myself to keep me busy in the spare time I had here n there.
So I drew a quick sketch of the kind of thing I would like to do with my character... Imaginitively enough I decided to take my passion for Wing chun kung fu and do a robot going through the motions and various techniques in wing chun but somehow come up with a way of getting it to tackle the various areas I wanted to tackle in this project... rendering, modelling, dynamic simulations and other things like that!
The first item of worry for me on this project was how I was going to deal with the cables and wires that I wanted to attach to the robot arms. I wanted them to have a dynamic motion that was a secondary effect of the character I would animate so I set about doing a couple of tests to see what would happen. The qtime mov below shows my first test which started to look promising quite quickly.
I also did some tests on muscle skinning and using expressions to get a pre-movement muscle flex effect. Its subtle but basically is an expression driven animation that causes the muscle pieces to flex before the animation actually happens. Human muscles aren't moved by the bone rotations - they drive the rotation through contraction. I wanted to create this subtle feel in the mech. I'm not sure its all that visible to be honest in the final piece due to the speed of the animation in places but I did labour over it lol.
I wanted the robot arms to feel flexible yet still have an underlying mechanical structure. I used basic metal shaders for the mech parts beneath but a carbon fibre like shader on the muscle pieces so I did some tests on shader networks and rendering. I started out looking at carbon fibre, then I robot for inspiration then other sources and finally come up with something that was semi transparent yet still able to feel like a skin of sorts.
Once I were happy with some of the initial tests I started working further into the robot detail... adding internal pieces and changing the effect of some of the shaders as I went. I put various bits together but also used simple hydraulic based mechanical parts which look effective in motion.
However at this point I felt it were going a bit away from what I wanted it to look like visually and I put it down for a month or so (to do lots of skydiving lol!) then with a friend, I came back to it with fresh eyes and altered its look to a more blue white & metal theme which I was much happier with and it held a sporty feel to the overall arms.
This spurred me on to finish the rest of the model... the hands that I'd avoided for ages got done in a few hours and ended up looking quite effective. Again I didn't labour over them too much - just enough detail to look convincing. To be honest I was fighting a constant battle with my pc which refused to render any more geometry at one point even in command line rendering.
After a few renders I did my first turntable of the robot to see how it looked...
