Hello, all. Bleeding over from the recent class I took with ZBW, Furio Tedeschi as instructor; I decided I would start a thread to catalog the exercise and go through to the final mech. Right now the dude himself, who I named RONIN, is close to finished but I still have plenty of ideas rattling around for what I want to do. He’s a decommissioned experimental robot, stolen by gang bangers, with the brain of a deceased bank robber.
The goal is move beyond just concept, and take a character into a game-ready state. We’re using Cry Engine 3 at work, and I have a badass animator who saw this guy and wants me to get him ready for animation and rigging. So that will be the engine I will bring him into.
Backplate is too low res. I’m still not used to working with keyshot. It’s making the dude look small, like a toy, right now. I plan to get a DSLR soon so I can study Focal length, aperture, etc, etc with some education from some VFX peeps rather than second hand. I think it’s good to dive into a field head first and learn to swim for yourself. But I’ve moved beyond that point with a lot of the stuff I’m doing now; It’s time for swimming instructor again.
Just a call-out/massive detail pass to show lower level details on the hands. I wanted the overall tone of the guys to encased parts with exposure to reinforce the sense that it’s manufactured rather than evolved. So lots of organic shapes with insets, clips, cut lines, exposed casing patterns and so on.
Okay…now for some info on the process. I started out with RONIN’s head. While Foo assigned us to do multiple versions, including multiple bodies, for the sake of experimenting with the silhouette; I usually know what I’m going for and just dive right in. One of the great ways that Furio educated the class is leaves the room for muscling through and figuring things out, but he gives you great advice for quickly getting a base to start from. Focusing on some tools rather than a particular technique. What I wanted to go for was something to challenge my pretty much non-existent skills with not only ZBrush, but with shape language and fusing details.
Shape Language: Evangelion.
Muscular Details: Deus Ex Human Revolution.
Mechanical Details: Engine casing patterns (Furio Tedeschi/Vitaly Bulgarov/Mike Nash/Aaron Beck type stuff) and unique bits with military style.
Some versions to placate the instructors desire for explorations. Kind of like this one. Went a little more in the metal gear/terminator direction with liquid or flexible metals. Maybe they’re muscles that cover the whole endo-skeleton. Just trying another shape language.
Then following the exercise for roughly morphing the Fembot into a heavy.
I like the dude’s stance from the front, but from the side it looks goofy to have his ass sticking out…kind of. I sort of still like it and come back to it, I just think the front/back tone conflicts with the one from the side. It’s like an assault droid vs a worker drone.