Major Project: Robot design

As Art Director, I was responsible for the character design of the Robot. I tried out a few different head shapes and features, but we came to the decision that we wanted our robot to be heavily influenced by the Iron Giant, complete with an austere look and blocky, hinged jaw.

When designing the rest of his body, it was important for me to consider the context of the robot’s creation; it had to be clear from the design that this robot had been roughly put together with whatever scraps of metal this lonely old man could get his hands on, and for this reason we went with simple cylindrical style arms and legs. We were initially going to have ball and socket joints, but decided on hinge joints after our Director pointed out that ball and socket joints are usually biological and wouldn’t theorectically work in a steamwork robot – or not the crudely built, not-so-cutting-edge kind of one that we were going for!

Rachel also around the same time found a cool robot rigging tutorial whereby a standard rig drives an additional underneath rig which rotates the individual hinge parts in a realistic and mechically correct way that would be seen in a real-life, physical hinge joint (See video here: http://youtu.be/KkWEt_fRlxo). So began the designing of technically possible joints for our robot! During this I had to bear in mind that the robot would need every rotation in his joints that a human does, which was a challenge when it came to the hip joint where we would need rotation in all three x, y and z axis.

Final year Major Project ‘North’

Final year Major Project ‘North’

Final year Major Project ‘North’

Final year Major Project ‘North’

Final year Major Project ‘North’

Final year Major Project ‘North’

And voilà, our final robot design:

Major Project: ‘North’

The Major Project is arguably the most important project I have this year. For mine, I’m working with three of my coursemates to produce a short, visually strong character animation about the Northern Lights. We’ve been working on it since October so we’re well into production now, but I’ll try and give a bit of an introduction as to what it’s about, and show where we’ve got to so far through a series of posts.

Our animation follows the journey of a steamwork robot whose mission it is to climb to the top of the mountain in order to release the Northern Lights into the sky. He is the invention of a lonely old man who lives in an isolated cabin amongst the snowy mountain range, and whom we are to believe has also created the beautiful phenomenon that is the Northern Lights. During his journey, the robot must battle through ferocious, high-speed winds and stormy blizzards, until he reaches the peak of the mountain and fulfils the task he was built for.

The team is as follows:

Rachel Laura Cooke – Director, Rigger, Lighting, Rendering
Lucy Ashfield (me) – Art Director, Cinematographer, Texture Artist
Alex Mortimer – Character Modeller, Animator
Ollie Walter – Environment Modeller, VFX Artist

Here is an early storyboard I did:

Master Class: Revised design

After a bit of making a fool of myself by posing with a broom and research into fantasy/medieval armour, I came up with this..

This project is all done and handed in now; modelling her was quite a challenge! It’s safe to say I was a bit over-ambitious with the design considering my modelling skills and the time I had left. I had to alter the design slightly where I had problems, but on the whole it turned out alright! I’ll post some pics once I get a nice render 🙂

Master Class: Initial design

Time for a real post! So the most pressing of my projects at the moment is the Master Class one, in the sense that the deadline is fast approaching and I need to get a wriggle on with it!

The idea for this project is that we devote 100 hours of work, the equivalent of two working weeks in industry, to complete a task set by industry practitioners – I guess to simulate how it would be in a real working environment.

Before Christmas we were lucky enough to be visited by the likes of Double Negative, Sony Games Cambridge, EA Criterion Games and many more, each of whom set a brief specialising in a specific area of computer animation. I chose the Character Project from Sony Games Cambridge.

I present to you (for lack of a better name) ‘Warrior Woman’. Yeah hopefully she’ll have a more interesting name but for now I’m concentrating on the design 😛

This was the initial model sheet I did for my interim submission. I’ve since had a meeting with a guy from Sony who gave me some useful tips for improving her design and pushing her character. While they liked her asymmetrical hair, they advised me to consider the following for my final submission:

–         Push the pose. Her pose could be much more dynamic and convey her character better, much like those seen in the reference board where the women ooze confidence and experience, casually holding their lethal weapon like it’s nothing.

–         Develop costume design. This is something I was going to do anyway, she’s definitely in need of some fancy ass armour to pass her off as the badass warrior she’s supposed to be! I’ll look at armour and clothing reference to see how various materials look and hang.

–         Use anatomical reference for sculpting muscle structure of exposed parts. An important point indeed for a character designed to be drooled over and/or envious of! She has many an exposed part 😉

–         Beef up her weapon. Pretty self-explanatory, definitely doesn’t look as though her current poxy little staff could deal much damage!