Mechanical Arms - how I put it together - PAGE 4
Below are a couple of images where I rendered out what I needed. For most shots a simple beauty pass and occlusion were enough. I then composited in glow effects on the lights to add the light bleed into the frame and also a very subtle amount of noise to each frame.
For one shot near the start I wanted some subtle lightning to light up the model but the lightning was composited int. I used what I call a light pass. This is where I assign a dark lambert to everything in a renderlayer, and I animate a light with a bright intensity and animate its position flickering on and off around the body of the robot. I then render this out and composite it into my shot using the screen option in afx. I also tweak the levels a bit. When the lightning is added it appears as if the lightning is lighting up the robot in small areas. Its worth the extra time spent on it.
For the shot below this actually ended up being one of the most complex shots as I wanted to do a pull focus from the robot to the gauges. I rendered out the various parts as separate layers then composited them in afx and used a slight move into the shot in the Z axis coupled with keyframed blur effects. Its quite effective although it proved quite painstaking to do strangely.
I then set about animating the rest of the shots I wanted to put in. The robot and dummy were quite nice to animate actually and worked quite well together. The first three shots in the playblast are almost exactly the same time and length as the first three shots in The mechanical Legs advert lol! After that I just worked through shots animating various techniques and trying to make it feel like the dummy was attempting to find a hole in the robot arms defense but is unsuccessful. Trying to make wing chun look impressive in animation is actually quite tough as alot of the techniques are subtle. I found animating short combinations on the dummy gave the best effect.. bong, lap, fak sao techniques into turning punches worked well and kwan sao techniques looked good too.
I thought at this point it would be good for the robot to deliver a killer blow to the dummy. I wanted to have him somehow shatter the dummy so I set about figuring out a way to do that... I broke the dummy up into shards and used blendshapes that when set to a value of zero give the effect of the wood being one solid piece. I also used some bend deformers too as the dummy would have to flex with the weakness of the wood. Also, and this was done early on, the wooden dummy magically sprouted 3 arms not two lol! Using the combination of blendshapes, deformers and also some animated fragments flying out of the wood I think it ended up creating a very convincing effect especially once I got the audio effect on it later on...
Here I decided to make my life a little tougher and thought it would be good if a splinter of wood flew out of the exploding wooden dummy, flew through the air bullet-time style and then hit a glass of liquid behind the robot...
Using realflow is quite difficult but the results tend to make it worth it. I was limited to the amount of actual particles I could use with my machine as it fell over and died otherwise so my liquid ended up looking a little blobby but the overall motion was quite nice I thought...
Finally with alot of work, alot of rendering, alot of compositing and alot of playing about with audio fx I put the final edit together. I'm quite pleased with it overall but it did take a long time - a full year of spare hours in fact. Mind.. that was amidst a 50hour working week, 6-8 hours of wing chun in the evenings, skydiving at weekends and then using what spare time I did have to catch up with friends and family oh yes and a sign language course at college too! In the midst of this project I killed my pc rendering, we finished a ps3 game at work, I spent 3.5k on a parachute, my sister gave birth, my parents split up, my hand needed an operation on it, a friend lost his eyesight, I went out to USA to collect aforementioned parachute, my other sister expanded to double her size through being pregnant too, and I learnt a shedload doing this project, not least of all the stamina needed to see it through to completion, so all in all it was very much worth the effort!
