Reel Pro 2 - Robot

Whew! Just finished another five week term. We double tracked with another class, so we had even less time in those 5 weeks to get our projects done. Anyway, here it is:
(Vimeo link for HD: https://vimeo.com/51805607)

This model is by the super talented Phillip Shaw. (You can see his stuff here: http://vimeo.com/25474721). Which, he modeled based on the concept of Doug Chiang.

Thank you soooo much Phil, for letting me take your model, turn it into a toy, and glitz it up. I know he did not intend it to be emasculated like this. So, thanks for letting me do it. (And I sure hope Doug Chiang doesn't mind...).

Anyway, there are a lot of CG robots out there, so my instructors said I should come up with a few ideas to pitch. I came up with a few goodies I think, but thought I would have the most fun with this. Plus, I'm sure no one will ever ask me to do this. Might as well take the risk and have some fun while I'm in school.

Here's the image I used to pitch this idea (I'll save the other ideas to do later):

The idea is that it's a boy robot which belonged to a boy, that was robot-napped and prettied up by a girl.

For each pitch idea I considered what the personality would be like, and how they'd move and be animated. Ex. The old concrete robot is old, stable, and stoic. Its steps are heavy and deliberate.

This robot is like an insecure teenage boy that is embarrassed it's been altered to look so girly. So, it'll move pretty lightly, since he's young and athletic like a lanky teenage boy. I imagine him animated to be super frantic, trying to hide and rub off all the glitziness.

The first week, I spent UVing this guy. I used a combination of Maya, Roadkill, and learned Headus to experiment and see how what was the fastest way of UVing 586 pieces of geometry. I also spent that week working on a demo reel for a reel review, which took so much longer than I thought. Then we had the other class to sit in and do assignments for. So, it was pretty hectic, and I was itching so much to get UVing over with and start on the textures. However, I realized that UVing is SUPER important in terms of planning for texturing. It makes it easier if you plan it out and get the UV's right the first time.

Then it was a matter of testing it to look like the right plastic with good lighting (which I should still adjust). I thought I had this figured out first and then quickly jumped to the fun part of layering on the textures. But my teachers very rightly switched me back to getting the materials right.

I also thought about what I might have problems with and need to figure out. A big glaring potential issue was glitter. I figured I should take some time at the beginning to test, rather than run out of time and scramble at the end.

And my teachers were really helpful in giving me suggestions and feedback. But, I didn't have the glitter figured out yet, and time was winding down, so I moved on to getting the whole robot shaded before getting back to the problem of the glitter. It also gave me some time to think about what worked/didn't work before, and find time to run out and buy some glitter glue to examine.

Here's the thought process I had with the shading of the robot. First, it's an old toy that belonged to a boy that was taken and prettied up by the girl afterwards. So, here are the elements of the robot body texture:

1) discoloration
2) yellowing
3) scratches
4) dirt and grime
5) clean up or wipe down by the girl
6) pink marker all over
7) new stickers
8) glitter
9) puffy earring stickers

Here's a video to kind of demonstrate the thought behind the layering of textures:

I actually put the most thought into the top of the body (which included the old sticker). But the foot was faster to demonstrate this with (and faster to render).

A problem I had was getting the marker to look right and went through a few versions (there are some versions that I can't find. It was probably when my Maya was crashing, and I didn't save my bucketed previews.)

I had a white plastic bottle of Shout to draw and sharpie/marker/highlighter all over to look at. It was also a balance of how young is this girl? Is she really terrible at this? Or is she older and a girl who very lovingly and carefully colored the robot over in pink? I decided to go with the latter because when I started texturing it super messily like a little girl, it was like chaos. And I wanted people to be able to look at it and not think, "Goodness. What is this mess? I don't want to spend another second looking at this ugly thing." I think I could still go back and mess it up a little more though. Give it some more imperfections and authenticity.

Also, another thing I learned with the marker pass is that Zbrush and Mudbox don't seem friendly to painting 3D on hardsurface objects with edge loops running across geometries (more obvious in the previous image with the unmotivated white lines running horizontally across the geometry). No matter how carefully I went across it in Mudbox to paint, it just didn't like me painting where there were thin edge loops running across. I went back thinking it was a UV issue, but after some tests and asking around, I realized it was just something that couldn't be handled right now in Mudbox. It was also something I didn't encounter texturing an organic geometry like the Ogre, with even topology running across it. I ended up fixing it in Photoshop, which made me really glad I UV'ed to not have stretch.

For the new stickers, it was the same sort of problem with making it look tacky like a little girl plastered it on there, or still look pretty. I also did some tests for the puffy earring stickers, which were essential... Hahahahah. They actually were! Nothing says "little girl" like puffy earring stickers that we all had when we were little. And the biggest challenge was to sell the idea. So, I really needed those stickers.

Previous version of the puffy earring sticker.

And time was quickly winding down, so I went back to the glitter. I still had my glitter geometry, but I tested it as a layer to add onto my layered shaders.

I loved it with the glitter EVERYWHERE. Hahah.

Thanks to Jenny for the eyelash idea.

Here it is again comped together with AO and zdepth for a macro effect. (I also learned this term how to render out a zDepth and comp it in Nuke with zBlur to create the macro feel.)

So then, I started rendering, and part way through the renders I decided to check on it... to see that the glitter was crawling and flickering like crazy! So I did some quick tests with a sphere. Up close, the glitter is ok. In a wider shot, it's crawling everywhere! I hadn't encountered anything like this. So I googled and looked around for a solution. Then learned to turn up the samples, which helped, but also gave me less of a cushion by the deadline since it increased the render times.

Here's the flickering/crawling of the glitter:

Here it is with the samples turned up:

Anyway, at the end of these crazy 5 weeks, I learned a TON. And they were all totally unrelated to the things I learned last term. Texturing organic vs. hardsurface models is VASTLY different and I'm so happy to have learned so much in the past 10 weeks.

My teachers said they wanted me to struggle this term, which I did... a few times! And I ended up having a really great experience of troubleshooting, being resourceful, finding answers, and testing things out very efficiently, since we had so little time to work on our projects this term. Which also means, I'll still be going to fix this project up and make changes!