Mechamation Complete!

Jimbo here and welcome to my first blog post.

So once finalising the Mech animation for shot 02,  Chuong could finalise on the dynamics for the debris that the Mech would influence in the shot. After a number of versions, i finally got the Mech ready for Mr Dynamics.
I then had the honor of taking on all the animation in shot 1 including the Hexalum as Kendrick was busy animating it for shot 2.
After about a month or so of sleepless nights, I am happy to report that i have completed my share of the animating for this amazingly ambitious project i am happy to be a part of. So please enjoy the signed off versions of the playblast for Shot01 and Shot02.

Shot 1

Shot 2

Mech issues

So we were getting issues with the rig where the legs geometry would always default to a weird position when Maya would open but initially we could easily fix this by just flipping the IK to FK and back to IK (or vice versa) when it came to animating. However now that the mech is actually ready to be rendered out, we did a test of the batch render and hmm… getting issues where the whole animation would render out as if the legs geometry was in the weird default position. Scary.

We tried to solve this by baking out the animation to an alembic which did work, but what it then did was not carry over the shaders and all of the shaders had to be plugged back in. This was a huge job and Brad was going nuts doing this again due to the sheer amount of parts in the mech. Then we realised that the model was itself was having some weird issues and so I decided that I should just fix it in the rig anyway. It would be better for myself to troubleshoot this problem and get it working, so I would know how to handle it in the future.

I noticed that we  have many bolts that are instanced with no zeroed out values and thought, hey, that could be it. Well, we all know by now that you can’t Freeze Transform on any instanced object and I was looking into how to fix this, but it appears the easiest way for me to do that is by duplicating the bolts (which would still have it parented to the transform, but can be easily unparented from the transform, and then FT would work. Doesn’t sound too difficult but it would only work if I duplicated it one bolt at a time… Mmm there are many many bolts.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-5162.html

I did this for the first leg and what do you know? It doesn’t work. So here I am spending the majority of what little time I have left to debug this with fairly minimal knowledge on what to do. Then it strikes me that we’re only using the IK legs in the animation so I decided to just delete the FK and result joints to solve it and wow, just what the doctor ordered.

 Below is a pic of the default position of the legs geo upon scene open.

Now the rig opens up fine with no dramas at all.

Mech: Update

Finally UV’d and Brad’s textures are looking amazing! Seriously outdoing himself here..

Texture decals

Damien put together a set of some really awesome looking decals for the Mech and carrier.

Rig Demo

These are the rigs that we demo’d in the class presentations today and are just quick demos of what the mech and the car can do.

The ‘Mech’ Rig Demo

The ‘Gurhka F5’ Rig Demo

Mech UV’s

Brad has been going crazy over the UV’s. After finishing the modelling process for the mech, I left Brad on his own to do the UV’s so I could start rigging the Mech. I feel kinda guilty that I couldn’t help him with them but I had to get the rig out so James can start animating it. I also had to get back to rigging the Hexalum beast as that hadn’t been touched for almost 2 weeks due to the modelling of the mech.

Brad’s text sheet of 32 udims…

So the plan was to receive the new Hexalum re-topo’d and re-posed geometry on Saturday morning and to start the rigging from scratch as the previous proxy rigs joints I felt were positioned a little too ‘tight’. However, I wasn’t able to obtain this until after lunch today and was stressing about keeping to our schedule of having all rigging done by Monday. Yep.. we have finally fallen behind schedule… officially.

 

Mech Update

Brad and I have both made amazing progress, if I may say so myself haha. But in all seriousness, it certainly has been an amazing experience thus far for me personally being able to work on the hero asset of the piece as I got to watch Brad and Damien do it at the end of last year on the Contrivance project.

So as excited as we are, here is the (somewhat) final model.

Can’t wait to see this bad boy textured!

Mech Modelling

Some very initial stages of the modelling process of the mech.

Mech Concept

Damien has put together some fantastic concepts on the Mech tank for Brad and myself to model.

The references for the mech.