Attempting the Difficult
Another technique used was adding an edit poly modifier on a smoothed piece, adding details and then optimizing the collapsed geometry as seen below
All these techniques combined properly can help achieve modeling most any surface in little time. Here is a video showing the combined use of booleans, retopo and poly modeling.
Creating all the pieces required a lot of patience, but it was done fairly quickly. Total time was approximately 3 months, for almost 3,000 parts (most of them nuts and bolts that I re-used a lot on the final model).
Rigging
From the beginning I knew this was going to be no easy task. With the model finished, the first thing I did was cut the truck into pieces. That way it was easier for me to plan how the transformation was going to take place, and I could better organize the workflow. After splitting the truck model I proceeded to give some thickness to the parts that needed it. I also added a low poly interior and some engine parts so it didn’t look empty.
Merging the truck with the robot model brought another problem, I couldn’t navigate the viewport faster than less than one frame per second, due to the complexity of the mesh. I came up with the idea of breaking the pieces into 11 groups, and rigging each group in a separate scene. If that worked out, I could then mix all the pieces later for rendering the animation. I wasn’t sure this would be successful, though, and it meant working on animation half blindly. I used a basic skeleton for the base mesh, and a lot of custom rigs on top of it to drive the transformation and movement of the pieces.
Some pieces had a morph modifier applied to achieve the desired shape (the accompanying image is an example of this). The morph modifier worked great for this effect. The other option was to use bones, but I would’ve ended up working with too many bones, and the rig was going to be a lot more messy. To avoid strange deformations I made progressive morph targets, and that way deformation looked more natural.
For most of the parts that were not directly attached to the skeleton I used a combination of reactions and wire parameters linked to a slider helper. This way the animation of the transforming pieces and parts was more manageable. I was able to overlap the animations of those parts very easily without getting confused in the process. The video is a small example of this.
I was trying to achieve natural-looking motion, and didn’t want to scale pieces when the transformation occurred. Neither did I want flying or levitating parts around the model. So I developed some small scripts to help with animating the groups of pieces, for tasks such as resetting the position/rotation relative to their parent, baking transformations, linking and unlinking several groups of pieces over time, etc. The rest of the parts was animated by hand.
The cloth modifier was used to produce the swinging chains animation.
Very impressive! (-:
this is really amazing, your work is really inspiring!
Amazing, great job !!!
I am an animator and there is never a day that you don’t learn. Thanks for the article. Your work is awesome!
woow buddy… awesome!!!!!
Nossa, muito bom.
awesome woRk dude……really cool modeling and thax 4 sharing this……>>>>>>>>
Thanks for your words guys!! i am really glad you like it , and thanks to maxunderground for the oportunity to share this experience here!.
Best Regards!
Luima.
Man, unbelievable!
My seriously congrats.
Hi Luis, I truly say it’s awesome…great work. I’m also great fan of ILM.
I’m trying to do the same …it’s in progress,meanwhile, I found your post and it is really very helpful to me thanks for that. I’m creating optimus in maya…
I just want to know little bit more about rigging. So please reply me and if you don’t mind plz tell me more about it.It will help me a lot.
THANX…
This is a total overkill. In every single aspect 🙂 I can’t remember seeing a non-commercial work done with so much details!
great jobs,
nice arts
Really is a great project, model can be downloaded?I want to put him into the toy.Or you can say to sell.Thank you very much