Len’s WIP

I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief. After relearning the basics of LightWave’s expression editor, I was able to come up with an okay solution for the treads. In a nutshell, LightWave expressions are mathematical formulas that create animation relationships between two or more objects. Here’s a simple example of this formula:

[len.wink] x 1 = [olivia.munn’s.latent.desire] x 100 - [clothing]

Here’s my test animation using such an expression. It doesn’t look perfect, but it’s good enough for now. Maybe one day I’ll get sick of how this looks and I’ll revisit this again and actually model the treads.

A better tread test

So I spent what little spare time I had last week refining and cleaning up the legs. I can keep on modeling details without actually getting any work done so I stopped myself. Last Friday I decided to take on the tank treads. I want to do something similar to what I did before: animate a bump texture on the tread geometry to give the illusion that the treads are moving. Okay okay, I just don’t want to model the treads. I also don’t want to go through the trouble of figuring out a tread rig and then adding it to my current rig. I know actually modeling the treads will look loads better, but I’m trying to economize time here. Unfortunately making an animated bump map, as simple as it seems, turned out to be a lot trickier for me. Mostly because of the different types of texture mapping. Long story short, a lot of experimentation gave me headaches and I took a break from this project all weekend. I resumed on Monday and have made little progress. This is going to take a lot of R&D so updates on this will take awhile. Bear with me as I try to figure out the best way to approach this problem.

In the meantime, I shall go to the pub and celebrate St. Paddy’s Day!

One of my many tread tests

It was only recently that archaeologists realized that a bowl they discovered in the 1970s from the “Burnt City” contains the world’s oldest animation. Prickly animators continue to debate this claim, since it does not properly utilize the principles of animation such as squash-and-stretch, overlap, or weight.

Giving up is not an option:

Didn’t want to think real hard tonight, so no animating. I did some modeling touch-ups instead. A couple of basic extrudes and bevels here and there, and already it’s looking better than the model from 2003. I also noticed I had a lot of open polygons and unmerged vertices. Hey, I was still learning 3D back then so of course the model is sloppy. I’ll clean those up another time when my brain is more alert. Can’t wait to start painting textures on this. Here is a beauty pass of the model in its current state:

Tankor model update 01

So I made a separate IK rig, tested it, and decided not to use it for the transformation. After taking a break and watching Shooter, I decided to use FK, which means I’d have to move all the joints of a chain individually instead of using one IK handle to control the chain. I’ll still use the IK rig for any non-transforming animations. In the meantime, here’s the update:

I spent much of last Saturday re-rigging this thing. I gave him a real basic skeleton with the intention to use IK (non-CGer definition: create control handles that can move multiple joints instead of moving the joints individually). Then I gave him weight maps to assign which bone controls what. Then the frustration came in. The joints work, but for some reason the legs deformed when I moved the joints. This is a robot that doesn’t have organic surfaces so nothing should deform. I took a break, played some relaxing piano, and watched Michael Clayton. After that I decided to start again and rig him using no bones and use only pivot points. Okay maybe some bones. I know this isn’t the best way to rig anything, but dammit I just want to start transforming him already! So after rigging I started making the important keyframes (non-CGer definition: posing the model). Several hours into keyframing, I found this nice little button in LightWave called “Enable Deform”. It was turned on. D’OH!!! And I’ve come this far with pivot points. Oh well. Here’s what it is at this stage. I’ll go back and redo the skeleton again.

This was a project I had for school back in 2003. It was for my texture & lighting class, then I used it for my compositing class. Ever since last year’s Transformers movie and this G1 video found here, my interest for robots, machines, and other mechanical moving parts rekindled. I decided to go back and revisit this old project to see if I can make it better. I mean, I will make it better.

So why Tankor? Because back then I watched Beast Wars and then Beast Machines. I’m probably one of the very few who liked Beast Machines. I liked it mostly because of Tankor, because he’s a tragic figure. Once he was beloved Maximal Rhinox who’s spark (a Transformer’s soul) was lost after a doomed voyage to Cybertron. Megatron was able to take his spark and place it in a mindless drone’s body, calling him Tankor, and used him against the Maximals. Kind of like me: I once had a happy soul and then it got lost, but then “The Man” found it and now I mindlessly work for him.

Back in August 2007 I did some work on this stage intro video for the band Project State: Unknown. The parts I did were the shattering of their old logo at the beginning, and the new logo fireball and electricity effects at the end. Those were done in After Effects.

Our jobs are in trouble…