Mech Fight WIP
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I was watching both Appleseed films and it irritated me how the mechs never seem to fight. They just spend their time strafing around each other sliding along the ground or flying through the air shooting each other. I then thought I'd have a go a at animating 2 mechs fighting at close quarters and see what challenges that would bring up. Heres a breakdown of the stuff I'd like to do with this project...
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do some cool animation of mechs kicking seven bells out of each other!
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produce some nice lighting & rendering
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look into doing some nice destruction tech as they fight
Okay here's a coupla screengrabs of the rough model - detail will be added to it in the future but its good for animation purposes for the moment. Once I've got the animation working I'll looking into adjusting areas to compensate for things like alot of knee bend and other things like that. Once I change the model it should translate directly into the animation scene as the characters are ref'd in.
This is a couple of basic renders of the mech on a white bg. quite effective I think :)
Got a bit of animation done on the mechs. The bot is ref'd into the scene where I have a simple polygon room for the moment which constrains the fight to close quarters. For characters this size I think its quite a small environment and when I fill it with destructible things like crates and a few lamps that can be knocked over and destroyed it should look cool :)
Okay been away from this project for a little bit but found some time last night to do a bit more animation and a low res draft render. Overall I dont think it looks too bad, theres some more work to be done on the weight in the animation but I quite like bits of it and the lighting looks rather smart - better than I thought it would lol! Click on pic below to download qtime mov (approx 6mb)
Not had much chance to pick this project up due to work, training, skydiving with it being sunnier, catching up with everyone and numerous other daft things getting in the way. I got a few guys to take a look at the v2 playblast I done and they give me some crits. I've made the first impact when white jumps at grey more powerful with more of a charge and they now travel some distance when they collide. I added more of snap when grey kicks white and white now hits the ground a bit harder. I then added a subtle bit of charging to grey when he jumps at white - its like he's leaning forward ready to charge and again they now get a bit of airtime before hitting the wall. I also shortened the time taken for grey to grab whites foot and throw him across the room. I've also added some secondary impact stuff like light smashes and toolboxes being hit as they battle. The last bit of this latest version shows white getting up and pointing his hand at grey. In this moment I plan to have whites wrist open up and launch a couple of missiles but the pose isn't very clear yet. This may actually be down to the camera position so I will be working on that bit next. Click on pic below to download qtime mov (approx 6mb)
Been working on this where I can in the last few weeks. Life has just been crazy with family and generally keeping on top of half a dozen hobbies - skydiving, wing chun and motoring lol so finding a spare hour or two has been hard! Anyhow regarding this project I got around to animating rockets launching from the mechs arms and hitting the other guy. From there he gets up and tries to rush the grey mech but is caught and slammed to the ground. I spent a good few evenings getting this slam right with advice and crit from the lead animator at work, and I think it looks loads better than my first attempt. Her advice was to add in the hold at the start as he lifts the white mech, and getting the right motion arc and timing on the slam have really improved it. Another tough bit was the slight bounce but I'm quite happy with it as I didn't over exaggerate it. With camera shake this bit should look really powerful. I also plan to add some ground deformation from the weight of the slam and a couple of objects that fall over in the process along with flickering lights as it happens. Another feature I've added in quickly is animated lighting. On top of the lights on each mech, I added a siren-like light on the roof. This is just a draft at the moment and I will make sure it looks alot better, but even without shadows as it is rendered now it still looks rather smart. I will add small flashing lights on the wall too for effect. Overall I'm quite happy with where its going, and the low res nature of the mechs in the lighting tends not to show up too much. I may go back to remodelling the mech and making it a bit more articulated with some chrome pistons and wotnot in the leg areas tho once the animation is finished. Click on pic below to download qtime mov (approx 8mb)
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