character – Mogra

On envato they had there free items of the month release from their various sites and as an asset junkie I was compled to download all of the free items that I even thought I might need. One of these was a robitic creation kit from graphic river by
RZDESIGN.

As a fan of robots and character designs I was drawn to the simple yet complex in customizeable optionsfrom these character parts. I decided as a simple exercise and quick project ( or so I thought) I would build a few of these characters.I picked one from his original dark set and light set.

The white bot I built first which was fairly straight forward since it mainly consisted of rounded long cubes. The only “real” modeling was the done on the head since I had cut into the head to make sure the mouth and eyes where all one part of the head. I did a bit of redesign with the arms so that they could move without just seeming like there coming out of the sides of the body magically.

The green bot was a bit harder to make which at fist seem like it would be pretty simple. The main issue I encountered was how to build the head/main body. A pentagon is a simple object to make in any 3D program and there usually is a one or two click solution. My issue was with cuts into the front face to make the eye and mouth with out there being a bunch of triangles and would allow it to smooth correctly.

There is seemingly no way to lay a grid out on a front face of a 5 sided object without some triangles though I did my best to hide or put them in places that won’t matter. I was able to layout some structure that let me cut into the face and allow for the edges to be smooth correctly with a hypernurb. Of course since I wasn’t really planning on doing any deformations in the face I might not of needed to take as much effort laying out the face, but using just booles ( which I’am sometimes guilty of using) would not have cut it.

I did a bit of redesign for the lower part where the treads are since in the original design they seem to connect directly to the main body, which in a static 2D design works but in 3D may be a bit of a stretch in how it would actually move. So I created a new base of the tread design of a model of a Hunting Russ Mk. II tank.

The next step I took was lighting the two bots which I started of well and posted some preview images of on my twitter, but as I continued to work on it I got hung up some details and reflection that I couldn’t get to emulate the original design correctly. Eventually I just said the heck with it and pushed through it and created a new save file that said final and after a few incremental saves, I had the final images. I also have a rotating camera up which I may render a full turntable of later.

I thought it would be cool if I cleaned up my my rig for the minion character and posted it so people can play with and maybe make their own cool characters. It’s noting to pretty inside so this is one of those as is type of files.

The rig has the ability to control the eye(iris) position, the eye lids for the top and bottom independently (lazy eye), both lids at once for a squinty look, and a full close. The mouth has 4 poses including smile, which I fixed now so that each range corresponds to a pose (ie: 0-.99, 1 to 1.99, etc…). Before I just had 0,1,2,3.

The arms are fully IK and so is the feet but it only allows for small movement since he has now legs… There is an also controllers for the middle top of the head and the bottom by the legs to add some extra movement.

It’s self contained in a zip file.

My other quick submission is my style frame for the cool golfers logo animation. I finished all of the animation correctly now which looks pretty good. I was planning on rendering it to today but I ran out of time.

My goal with the final design is to try and make it seem on top of the grass or some what coming out of it without a light really beaming down on it.

I still need to work on the lightning of the logo and I notice some errors in the text.

The biggest error that I missed though is that in all of my previous submissions I spelled golfer golgers. It’s funny how you can miss things like that. I wish cinema had a spell check for times like this. I’m sure someone made a script for this.