Monday, 1 March 2010
How to Make a Big Stompy Robot!
About a week ago, Rich discovered a completely awesome short film about Big Stompy Robots and was consequently inspired to practice animating his own. For several days and nights I barely saw him, but today I eventually managed to drag him out for coffee and force him to tell me what exactly he was doing (in words of one syllable that a mere mortal like myself could actually understand):
Step 1: Rich went shopping for a Big Stompy Robot model which would be suitable for animation. He eventually chose a suitable Poser figure, exported it from Poser into Softimage and then broke apart the model into various body parts (poor little thing) that would need animating, eg feet, legs, thighs etc.
Step 2: He then rigged the model. Given that the model has a very unusual joint structure, it took quite a few attempts to make a rig that moved in a realistic motion. The final rig had only three controls: the main centre of gravity for the hips and a control for each foot. This allowed complete animation of movement. (Note for future: Rich intends to later animate the gun barrels and add rocket launchers. Personally I think he’s been playing too much Supreme Commander!)
Step 3: He then added a bump map to the model. This was created by doing a high pass filter in Photoshop on the texture map for the model.
Step4: This involved building a walk cycle animation, which caused lots of fun because Rich didn’t realise that he had put one of the feet on backwards! The result was that the leg moved in all three axis when he tried to animate it, so he had to break the model apart again and re-do the rigging in order to get it right.
Step 5: After animating the walk cycle, Rich loaded the model into the matchmoved footage of our ping pong table (from last time, if you recall) and finished the render. To add a bit of interaction to it, he added a model car (a Mercedes – they really do deserve to be stomped on) and enabled “hard body simulation” in Softimage. This allowed the car to react when the Big Stompy Robot walked into it.
So here’s the result:
Kinda cute, eh? I think it’s kinda dainty-of-foot for something that’s supposed to be so big and scary, so it’s obviously a girl robot. Let’s call her Tippitoes. In fact Tippitoes is so darn cute that I’m thinking of casting her in a future movie. More on that in due course...
Step 1: Rich went shopping for a Big Stompy Robot model which would be suitable for animation. He eventually chose a suitable Poser figure, exported it from Poser into Softimage and then broke apart the model into various body parts (poor little thing) that would need animating, eg feet, legs, thighs etc.
Step 2: He then rigged the model. Given that the model has a very unusual joint structure, it took quite a few attempts to make a rig that moved in a realistic motion. The final rig had only three controls: the main centre of gravity for the hips and a control for each foot. This allowed complete animation of movement. (Note for future: Rich intends to later animate the gun barrels and add rocket launchers. Personally I think he’s been playing too much Supreme Commander!)
Step 3: He then added a bump map to the model. This was created by doing a high pass filter in Photoshop on the texture map for the model.
Step4: This involved building a walk cycle animation, which caused lots of fun because Rich didn’t realise that he had put one of the feet on backwards! The result was that the leg moved in all three axis when he tried to animate it, so he had to break the model apart again and re-do the rigging in order to get it right.
Step 5: After animating the walk cycle, Rich loaded the model into the matchmoved footage of our ping pong table (from last time, if you recall) and finished the render. To add a bit of interaction to it, he added a model car (a Mercedes – they really do deserve to be stomped on) and enabled “hard body simulation” in Softimage. This allowed the car to react when the Big Stompy Robot walked into it.
So here’s the result:
Kinda cute, eh? I think it’s kinda dainty-of-foot for something that’s supposed to be so big and scary, so it’s obviously a girl robot. Let’s call her Tippitoes. In fact Tippitoes is so darn cute that I’m thinking of casting her in a future movie. More on that in due course...
Labels: test, tutorial, visual effects
Friday, 15 January 2010
Face Tracking Test
Resources: SynthEyes, Softimage, After Effects, camera, sticky dots + willing victim.
This was an experiment to practice object tracking to see if I could effectively match move Mervyn the Monster’s head onto a real human head (many thanks to Michael, who bravely volunteered for this task.)
First I put tracking markers on Michael’s head. These were simple sticky red paper dots that you can buy from any stationery store. The dots were specifically positioned on his head so that they wouldn’t move relative to each other. Then I filmed him moving his head around.
The next step was to transfer footage to SynthEyes and perform an object-based match move on the markers. This results in all of the markers being treated as part of the solid object and the output from SynthEyes is the movement in that object. I then took the results of the match move and loaded it into Softimage. This gives you a virtual camera that sees the object move in 3D in the same way as it does on film. You then load in the object that you want to composite onto your footage, which in our case was the large chunk of Mervyn’s head. I created a mask that hid the part of Mervyn’s head that I didn’t want to be visible and then rendered out the sequence. Finally I composited it into Adobe After Effects which produced the final output.
Voilà! Boy and Monster are as one!
The total time taken for this was around six hours. Please note that I didn’t make any effort to ensure the cut-out of Mervyn’s head fit cleanly, so the match move isn’t perfect. This was a proof of concept – and it worked! Next time I will do better!
This was an experiment to practice object tracking to see if I could effectively match move Mervyn the Monster’s head onto a real human head (many thanks to Michael, who bravely volunteered for this task.)
First I put tracking markers on Michael’s head. These were simple sticky red paper dots that you can buy from any stationery store. The dots were specifically positioned on his head so that they wouldn’t move relative to each other. Then I filmed him moving his head around.
The next step was to transfer footage to SynthEyes and perform an object-based match move on the markers. This results in all of the markers being treated as part of the solid object and the output from SynthEyes is the movement in that object. I then took the results of the match move and loaded it into Softimage. This gives you a virtual camera that sees the object move in 3D in the same way as it does on film. You then load in the object that you want to composite onto your footage, which in our case was the large chunk of Mervyn’s head. I created a mask that hid the part of Mervyn’s head that I didn’t want to be visible and then rendered out the sequence. Finally I composited it into Adobe After Effects which produced the final output.
Voilà! Boy and Monster are as one!
The total time taken for this was around six hours. Please note that I didn’t make any effort to ensure the cut-out of Mervyn’s head fit cleanly, so the match move isn’t perfect. This was a proof of concept – and it worked! Next time I will do better!
Labels: test, visual effects
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