Refined Robot Concept

As part of our agreed plot for the surveillance machinima I had to design a robot as one of the characters to be modelled for the animation, going on my team mates designs and initial ideas I first created a character that both my team mates liked the look of, however we came to a conclusion that the first design looked too much like the design for the Iron Giant so I instead came up with a more menacing design shown below.

After making this quick draw up I showed my team mates and they agreed that this was the design we would use in the animation, I'm happier with this design because the character generally looks more menacing and evil as he is meant to be plus he also looks more adapted to life in the ice tundras that our animation takes place in.

I would have liked to have done a better drawing of this design but because the team decided later I had to stick to drawing a more simple turn around pose with one colour drawing to give enough information to my team mates who were modelling the robot only lacking in my usual digital detail that I like to put in my artwork.

Maya - Alien Binding

After creating the character and its controllers it was time to glue everything together through the wonderous world of binding. The objective behind binding wasn't perticularly difficult to understand, it simply came down to the fact that without binding the skin to the skeleton the geometry just would not move when the controllers on the skeleton were made to move.

 

I followed the video to the letter and did as I was instructed to do, the results were positive and I was rewarded with a fully functioning Alien model whos geometry would now move when its skeleton was manipulated through its controllers. I'm really happy with how it all turned out and I havn't really had too may problems from this part of the making of my character which i'm happy about but I still have quite a way to go until I can remember how to do these parts without having to look at the video tutorials and will continue to use these outside of study as reference to other projects.

Maya - Alien Controllers

Now that the geometry of the alien was ready as was its skeleton it was time for me to create the controllers that would soon enough manipulate the skeletal structure.

The first time I watched the tutorial for creating the controllers I was extremely confused and quite overwhelmed by how many needed to be used for a little alien model, it made me think about how many controllers could be used for more complex models like a giant snake-spider monster or something of like like.

 

Having recapped the video a few times I began to understand where to place the controllers and why they had to be snapped to each perticular spot, I also learned how to create nice looking shapes using the maya grid, I used this knowledge to create my master controller with the various arrows coming off of it.

 

After everything was made I had to make sure that everything was parented up properly to the correct joint on the rig in order to make it move, this was when I learned about different orient constraints and how they work. The final thing that I did was to make each controller distinguishable from another, I did this by colour co-ordinating the left, right and centre controllers.

RED = Right

BLUE = Left

YELLOW = Centre

WHITE = Master

The colouring part was probably my most favourite part of the whole controller process because I didn't have to think much about what I was doing and it gave me good time to recap in my mind what i had learned and how I could apply what I had learned to my machinima model and future out of hours models.