PLANT-i

These are my final submissions, I am calling this project done.

It was an awesome experience to work on this cute robot and it helped to extend the boundaries of my limited knowledge of 3d and more importantly texturing and rendering.

Hope you guys like my entry :)

Here the robots are spreading the seeds of the plants to regrow our lost environment and make the place a liveable place again. The robots carry different specimen plants to a wide variety of places like on flat lands, marsh muddy areas, and even on the water covers to spread the the seeds. 

Plant-i has 3 main tools for getting the plantation job done nicely. 01) A metallic 3 rod arm for removing dead plants and big pieces of stone to clean the area. 02) The injector is used to drill to a specific depth in the soil plant the seed. 03) The water shower is used to sprinkle tiny droplets of water to the growing plants.

Here Plant-i is in the lab with the last living specimens of the plants existing. The lab has an artificial light setup where several Plant Pots are kept to grow and survive.

The story scene render for the robot character / Plant-i.

Some turntable to show the 360 view of the robot with textured, clay and wireframe view.

Some closeup shots of the robot to show the texture quality and design.

The texturing is done in Substance Painte.

Here the character can be seen hovering above the ground and using one of its tool for watering the plant.

Here the character is in standing pose with all the tools inactive.

Some Static Renders of the Robot.

The whole lighting setup was done in Blender and the scene were rendered using Cycles renderer.

The big boy is ready for hitting some lights and cameras. Next task is to start with adding the texture to the model in blender and preparing the shaders for renderning ans scene development.

I have used few smart material and some standard material for developing the surface. Created few alphas in photoshop for making overlay stickers.

Started texturing the character in Substance Painter. I assigned vertex groups to different parts and baked them as ID maps in substance painter.

Final model ready for texturing in Substance Painter. 

Rigged the different part of the body with Empty object in blender and parented it to respactive parts.

The UV layout is done for all the parts. I am using Udims for getting high resolution in texture. I have used Uv Packer(Blender Addon) for packing the uv islands for max optimization.

The topology of the model and grouping of the model is done to organize the process and make is easy to work on.

Now moving onto more refinement of the model and starting with retopo and uvs in Blender.

I am planning to use Udims for this character because i would like to make a nice deatiled texture set with stickers and imperfections.

The front clay view of the sculpt. And a quick rough breakdown of the sculpt wireframe and polygroups setup.

Here are some modelling updates from the weekend. It was fun exploring and making the final forms of the character.

A bit more work on the blockout and defining the main blocks for the character.

Starting with rough 3d blockout in zbrush and blender using primitives. Then making few detailed elements to check the overall quality and level of detailes required to create this cute stylized robot. Its super important for me not get overwelhmed and spend time in detailing one part of the model. 

I have used deformenrs to create some custom shapes and boolean operations to punch the hole in the foot mesh. Then remeshed the mesh using zremesher by marking polygroups.

Now moving towards creating a visual design form based on the idea for the character. Did few rough shape designs for the character features and shilloutte. Here is the final one that i will focus on and develop as a 3d version.

Finally got some time to start working for this competition. Last month was a bit busy with learning motion design and animation for a shortfilm i am working on since last 4 months.

The idea is to create a robot which can create a link of communication between Plants/seeds and human life form. The robot can read and sense the signals from the plant and express it via audio-visual modes.

The name of this robot is PLANT-i. The robot will have a set of tools and technology to analyze the soil and plant more trees/plants By using the seed generated by the plant. Will develop the concept after studying the references and my ideas.

Thanks

Some preliminary design guiding concepts