Tiny body! Why are you so po! Probably because I just made some circles and stuck them together in the vague hope that it might look not crap. Well, it did, and I lost all interest in doing this for months!
I thought it might help to do a quick black sketch of a simple body shape - really dont want to spend long on this bit, but it needs to be there! The thought of a floating head is pretty tempting! Im liking the window wiper style of the arms on the left!
See! I’ve plopped the colours onto the render rig and it’s not too shabby! Need to tweak it some more, slap it in a background maybe? and sort out the really off specular and reflection mix going on over the top. Look at thoose eyes for example - WAY to shiny right now. Why! It looks almost like T2 when hes transforming. Chrome dancer. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t made these blog pages bright pink. Kinda clashes with everything!
Oh shit colours! Coming at ya like Cleopatra! The man Coaster, and maGrin have bin lookin this right over for the past hour or two like a map, tweaking like a maths genius tweaks the numbers, popping then all in the right place. This image is a Photoshop play around, messing with the orignial image. It’s probably well overcooked, but thats the way I like it, at least at the moment - probably going to make me sick up a bit tommorow in my mouth.
Now I need to connect these colours back into the shading tree so I can render out angles until my heart is content. Sadly, I expect about a yonk load of posts of this in different angles while I try to get the spec right. Still not convinced by the eyes yet, but they are on the right motorway.
Check out this rubs image!I’m building a lovely sponge cake filled with lovely layers ready to bake in the photoshop oven. Theres the colour layer, the final gather layer, a pinch of ambient occlusion and every magpies favourite jam filling the specular layer!! I wish it was tastier. Really i’ve made a lovely unbalanced heap of dough, not pleasing my little peepers at all, and generaly just making me sad as I realize how long it’s probably going to take me to balance all these ingedients out. At least this means it spits the right renders out! A tiny step!
Amazing! Both eyes are modeled out and rigged for basic movement! You can see the way i’ve rigged a three pronged base for the eye, mounted on the big plastic mount board behind the head! It all works, you can barely see it when all the other geoms turned on, but I don’t care! I know it’s there and i’m anal enough to care! You don’t have to though.
Oh lordy! Now I can finaly go back to trying to sort out some decent colours for this nightmare! Heres pretty much the same shot as before, rendered better. Getting there??? Please be finished soon!
I’m one day going to get some animations up! Need to show this thing in action!
I’ve been working on these eye blobs for a bit tonight. Not really finished yet, but they are on the way. He looks utterly bacon flavour frazzles right now, which might be a bit much… hmmm. Maybe just one eye should be like this??? One mad eye!!!
Massive image the size of a small bus! I’m so close to finishing this irratating fucking jaw! I’m never building anything like this again. Amazingly i’ve eliminated all the cut-through - bad polys - stupid shapes - piss poor modelling and even sorted that stupid bit that looked like a tea-cosy. It’s all rigged, apart from the googly action that I might just give up on now that i’ve almost finished it. Please ignore these temporary colours who are here just so it’s easy to see what bits what.
Come see whats behind the eyes of this robot! Yes, I have built a big blue piece of plastic to stick behind the main face and mount all the mechanics on. I’m now starting to connect it all up. Eye flaps, you go first. Eye motors. Follow suit!
Amazing! Never before seen double spring action on the back of the eye flaps. Lovely! Pieces of springy shit took 2 hours and 8 clusters to set up right. But now even a rock cake’s not as solid! This is all part of a vague plan I have to make this character follow the Muppet tradition of having googly eyes that spin around like fruit machine rollers. Bouncing up and down on the bouncy castle of life! Eye Flap Wheel of Fortune!
I’ve been making an ear’ole on the babys hat to let the sound in. Bless him! It needs some screw holes to hold it on, and i’m getting to them! Here is an instructional jpeg on how I built it. OMG!
Here, we see a NURBS surface, scaled to the shape I want the ear piece to be. In the second pic, amazing shapes are drawn over the sphere in an orthagonal view.
Now see! The magic! Loft the crazy curve shape through the sphere and intersect the surfaces to create curves on the actual surface of the sphere! Then use the awesome offset curve on surface tool to create outlines bigger and smaller than the original shape. Whhoooo there! What are they? They are our guides for our bevels and no less! Now, convert the original NURBS to polys and use the old NURBS sphere as a LIVE surface to draw all the nice vents on. Now bevel the nessecary edges and BBOOOP! We have a lovely perfect poly surface which will smooth down a treat should we need it to look smooth like a butter square.
Well that was utter bollocks. Hope you don’t try to do this, cause it’s late, my girlfriends waiting for me, and that all made no sence. They call me the professor…….. Get your specs on.
