Major Project – Robot

This Major Project is a 3D animation story that follows a journey of 3 robots in an overgrown earth after humans had all been extinct. I was tasked in making one of the robots in the animation story.

Group Miro board

We wanted each robot to stand out uniquely from each other and a clear different in each other personality. However, we wanted two of the robots to be connected or linked. We decided to make the two robots rescue service robots so that the two robots are clearly demonstrated to the audiences that they are already friends because they worked together in the past. We did know the main robot of the story was going to be a small botanist robot who cares about flowers in the beginning.

the Robots body shape trio

Our group went with the classic body potation and shape used in many animation films. One small, one thin and one big robots. Example (Mulan 1998) the 3 friends help Mulan in the movie and are shaped in this way to stand out.

Character Development 

I started off by creating sticky notes of robots. Then I would pick the best ones and sketched them digitally. These sketches were designs to fit what the group was looking for. What the group was looking for was a robot skinny and “creepy” but also “friendly” and have a comedically aspect that is built into him. These images show my work procession in making my robots and what images i looked at. and how i slowly developed into the final robot design

 

Sketches Robots ideas 

Here are close up of each robot sketches I created.

 

 

Number one was strongly based off the game Portal 2 (2011). I like the egg design shape to demonstrate a sense of friendliness from his round shape. the large legs and feet was designed to make him more built to be able to jump far distance.

Number two was designed off mining robots. Now this robot design broke away from the skinny theme that the team wanted but i though it was an interesting idea to considered. I was supposed to be a creepy spider figure that would waddles around the animation comedically

Number three design was a better design in the sense that it hit the slightly creepy but yet was round and had big eyes to give a cuteness and friendly feel. I really like the spinnable stomach that could be animated comedically. This robot also was designed to have a hunch back that was intended to let us put grass and flowers covering him, adding to his friendly cuteness look. However this design didn’t hit the idea of a skinny shape that my robot had to look in the project.

4th robot design shape that i liked but like the third robot design it also failed to get the character shape for the animation to be very skinny. This designed with the idea getting elements of the 1st robot shape and create a strong 3 armed robot. I liked the idea of having a broken robot but it didn’t get chosen as the final design.

The fifth design. This robot was piratically liked by the group for hitting the skinny theme that the robot need to be. It was not seen to be as friendly or cute enough for the group project so I continue to developed this robot until i hit that goal.

I expanded the fifth robot design more.

At this time I looked at the New film released this year called ” The Wild Robot.” The story also followed a similar story idea of our project where a robot learn to live in the wild. I really liked elements of the Wild robot character and took inspiration in creating the roundness of the robot. The greatest thing i took from using the wild robot design function of the neck extending. This was a highly comedic element that the robot would use in the story to jump scare the other robots. It was also a way to show that the robot had no sense of personal space and was an element added to his personality.

 

 

Block out of our main 3 characters

Animal companion sketches

At the start of the project we thought it would be beneficial to create cute animals that might be in the world setting or an animal companion that goes with the robots in their self adventure for a flower

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I drew up three ideas for the animal companion to be. Each animal was created with a mix of two other animal. The otter and Caterpillar one had a green back because it was designed to have a layer of grass over his back as camouflage.

Sadly we realized that the scale of the whole project we would be too ambitious to try adding in animal that would lead us into having to do more animation work on top of the already made robots. We decided to forget adding in animal  unless we managed to have more time at the end of the project pipeline.

 

 

Project timeline Plan 

 

 

 

 

Robot scale re-sized improvement

Initially When building my robot I had him a 2.23  meters tall. As a group we wanted my robot slightly shorter than the Big robot in the animation. It also based the robot off the scale of a typical door frame is 2.1 meters. I went an scaled my robot down to 1.9 meters to be able to fit under doors in our world setting that are scaled at 2.1 meters.

Robot Detail Improvement 

Miro Board – Refence image for making robots joints

 

 

Eye and eyebrow expression test of the Slim Robot

 

 

 

Textured Robot

When texturing my robot I looked at what colours are used in mountain rescue teams. I did see that the colour red was used a lot and element of bright Yellow. I really liked the Red design at first and I though the yellow was a close second.

Robots together test

After putting our robots together I decided to go back to the Yellow texture design. I felt that the red didn’t look that good compared to the other robots

 

Spin around of the robot

Robot Eyes changes 

I created a digital looking eye for the robot. I piratically liked this idea. However it ran into problems when seeing it from a far. It would often flicker. How i overcame that problem was that I lower the lines width on the robot screen that I made to create the digital look. I also made the emission light only on a sperate circle plane. This was done so it felt more like one big eyeball and that it was more obvious where the eye was looking.

Rig of the Robot

The robot has now FK and IK switches for each sides of the legs and arms

 

 

 

 

Slim Robot head and eye movement test

 

Increasing the Painterly look

Updated Texture of SL_Robot_010 

After Feedback we as a group was told that we went away from the art look the projected wanted to hit. We realised that it was true so I went back to fix it. I went to my robot and raised my robots saturation up and added a Substance effect called Matfx oil paint. This give more of a painterly look that more fitted to the projected art style and fully fixed this problem.

 

 

Oil lick under the knee 

 

Semester 2 – Walk Cycle and Robot animations

 

SL Robot Walk cycles 001

SL Robot Walk cycles 002

SL Robot Walk cycles 003

SL Robot Walk cycles 004

Walk cycle for each other robots 

I tried to make a smooth walk cycle for my robot. I calculate the distance of my robot and found that it travels 168cm per 60 frames. My teammates sent me what they did later and I had this handy note in my book to remind me the walk distance of every robot into centimetres.

All three Robots in the environment scene. (picture at the end of semester 1)

 

All three Robots (picture at the end of semester 2)

Really happy how they all turned out and how my robot looked.