Watering flowers

Sorry about the lack of updates. A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks and unfortunately I haven't had time to work any more on this project. So here is what I managed to come up with. I have tweaked the colors a bit and used Substance Painter's renderer for the finished product. I hope you like it! :)

Ninth Update | More realistic flowers: In the previous renders you can see that I had made some flower textures. They look decent enough, but I felt something wasn't quite right. When I textured them the first time, I used a picture of a flower petal and another of a sepal and copied them all over the diffrent UVs. And that worked well enough, but the problem was that I didn't get the correct material values, which made them look a bit fake :/

So what I have done now is that I found two free 3d scanned flower textures on textures.com and instead of trying to paste those on the UV (and making as mess), I chose to do it the oposite way and insted placed the UVs over the textures.

But I still only wanted one texture set for the flower, so in Substance's, I used the fill layer, turned of repeat and scaled/moved the two different flower textures i to the correct positions. This worked surprisingly well :)

Eight update: A lot has happened in the last two days. I have now completed the UV mapping and performed the first round of texturing in Substance Painter.

The UV mapping has been quite time-consuming and tiring, but because of that I have learned many new tricks and methods when it comes to using the UV tools in Maya :) So if I had to do it again, I think I would be able to do it in much less time :)

The texturing you see below is not finished. I just wanted to try to come up with something quick and decent for now to test the UV's. I have plans to tweak and adjust the model until the event deadline. I'm also thinking of trying and coming up with a suitable enviorment, but for now I'm completely blank :3

Image below is rendered with the iray renderer in Substance Painter. 

Also, I ended up making a new watering can since I didn't like the old one that much. Felt that this one was better suited to the style I'm going for :) Modeled it based on the picture on the right.

Seventh Update | UV mapping: I have now started with the UV mapping. There are still a few things that I want to tweak, but I'm now pretty happy with the robot itself, so I've spent most of this day working on the UV map for it. It's almost finished apart from some minor adjustments :)

Sixth update | The pram: I wanted to do something cool with the cart that he pulls behind him. Until now I had planned for it to be some kind of wood wagon, but to be honest I found it quite boring. I want to try to show that the living conditions are not the best, and that he has to use scraps and other stuff around him to keep going.

So then I came up with the idea that he uses a broken pram to pull the batteries :)

Fifth Update: Flowers! I have now started on the flowers. In the beginning my plan was to use simple planes with flower textures and opaticy map, but since I have quite a lot of time I thought I'd try to actually model them. This is my first time trying flowers, but I think it went pretty well. I used the image one the right as a baseline. I will be tweaking them quite a bit in the future. I'm actually a little worried about how I'm gonna texture it since I've hardly ever worked with organic materials before, but that's for another day.

Fourth update: I've now reached a point in the modeling phase where I'm slowly getting closer to something I'm happy with.

I have made many small adjustments to the cables. I want it to look just right. I added crocodile clips to the end of the main power cables as an added detail. I also made a new trolley, but I will probably change it in the future as it doesn't feel quite right.

I want there to be a reason for him to walk with a cane, so what I came up with is that one of his legs has started to fail. The foot part is gone, so he put in a metal rod of some kind to make up for it, but with this fix, his balance isn't the best :( So to make up for it, he walks around with a cane for extra support :D

I also want you to see that he is a personality, so I added a walkman to show that he likes to listen to music. I'm also going to try and show more of his personality with the texturing :)

The image below is a test render I did with Redshift. The plan is to use Substance Stager to render the finished image, but this is only to see how it is with shadows etc.

I'm still in the modeling phase, so I haven't started UV mapping or texturing yet.

Third update | Cables, face and more: I have now started adding cables :) I also made a belt that goes around the batteries to hold them in place. In addition, I made a small rope with a knot which is then connected to the back of the robot so that he can walk around safely with the trolley without risking breakage of the cables.

I also made the face. My idea behind it is to make him emote like happy old man. I'm pretty happy with it, but it might change in the future.

Btw, the plant isn't mine. It's just a placeholder until I figure out what plant/flower I want to make. The plan is to finish modeling the robot and all its accessories first, and then make a fitting the plant. It's just there so that I can get a small taste of what the end result might look like.

Second update | External battery: I want to emphasize that the robot is old, so to show that I made a trolley full of batteries which shows that there is some fault/wear, so he needs extra power to stay on.

In the next update I will add the face and start to figure out how I'm going to do the cables. 

Inspiration: I have an ish idea of how I want it to look. I'm thinking of making an old robot that waters plants of some kind. Below you can see what I plan to use as inspiration for the modelling. I think the pose of his body should be something like the first picture and the head should resemble an old CRT TV/monitor. He is also going to have a cane. 

First draft: It would be nice if I could have sketched out my idea, but I have zero skills when it comes to drawing humanoid figures, so I started straight on the modeling part to try and find a shape I like. This is the first draft I came up with. The plan is to create and shape my idea based on it and add more stuff/details as I work.

For the modeling part I will be using a combination of Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D. The reason for this is that both programs have their good and bad sides, but if I use them together I get the best of both worlds! :D For UV mapping I will only use Maya (obviously).