Bruno Estevez
Rigging
Project.
Research
First i started my research my looking at mech images to give me and idea of what i first had the idea of creating a human like robot with like bulky armour some almost like of the halo games but with my own mix.
I first started looking at Halo games and the Spartan armour and how the armour fit to match movement so i looked at place armour would bend on the body.
I also looking at a game called Bioshcok the character i was looking at was the big daddy character because he uses a big bulky armour with weapons attached to it.
After researching and carefully thinking on what i wanted to base mech on i no longer wanted to make a human like mech or power armour instead i dicided that i wanted to do something different and i was think about animal and the animal i set my focus on was a dog or wolf. I thought an animal that walks in all four would be an intresting thing to rigg its movement.
So i began looking into dogs and dog mechs online to get an idea of how i wanted to model my mech.
Movement.
After looking at dog mech models i began researching how a dog moves i looked more into how they walk and what i found is that when they walk the move either both left front and back leg forward or back at the same time so in a pattern like bot left both right so on so on.
I used this clip to help me base the movement of my mech and match it to the real thing.
Notice how the dog on this clip moves both left front and back legs at the same time and a same thing applies to his right legs.
Here is my first attempt using blend shapes. The way i look at blend shapes is like a sculpting tool that you can make disappear and sculpt somewhere without affecting the first edits you did. I found this tool very useful for designing or editing details on characters.
Here is a small clip of me showing of my rigged that i have made in Maya.
What i did here was i created joins and parented them with my arm parts allowing me to do this with my arm.
Modeling.
I first made a slim version of this rigged arm you see in the video adding joints by extruding the face.
After i finished the slim version i made a more bulky version (which you can see on the video) and i smoothed its down to look a little more real.
Test.
In this video i simply test if my rigging is working by moving it around.
i did this because i wanted to see if moving my rigg would cause any parts of my model to disconnet of bend in a way its meant not to so i can fix it.
On this clip i just show off a simple animation of my rigged model moving.
This is not yet the final completed version of my animation.
Here is the final clip of me moving around my rigged mec. Crawlers was my main source of inspiration during this project which I first started out with a robot looking human then decided to make it like a dog however with my own model. It also Inspired me to use the color scheme of it a dark grey however mine had highlight with a bright orange.
