Glowbot

Final Render

Today has been a very busy and challenging day, spent adding extra details to texturing, creating a little bit of environment, defining the lighting and making several render tests. Finally I can share the end result of my work! I still plan in the future to animate the robot and add more elements to the environment, but I'm satisfied of the result achieved for the challenge entry! 

Below you will find some more steps of today's process, but here's the final render, I hope you like it!

Environment

For the main environment I modelled and textured a simple mushroom after gathering some reference images on the web.

Layout

I then posed the robot and chose the framing for the camera. I later exported everything to Blender. I modelled two rough trees, they didn't need to be perfect because I would have put them out of focus, so I've used a displacement map with some noise to make the bark. I also put two rock-like objects close to the camera to add something in the foreground and achieve more depth of field in the scene.

Shading, Lighting and Rendering

I've made some rendering tests with Cycles, but the time needed was too much. With Eevee the result was good enough, so I went on with this engine. I did the shading by connecting the textures exported from Adobe Substance Painter and worked a little bit on the mushroom. I've put a light inside of it and used subsurface scattering on the gills of the mushroom and a little bit on the stem too. I've used the ambient occlusion map baked with Substance Painter to add some color variations on the gills.

The background is a blue plane with some lights pointing at it. I wanted some variations, to give the idea of the presence of branches in the background so I played with different noise textures to add some darker colour.

The only post-processing I did was to add some motion blur to the blades with Adobe Photoshop to give a sense of motion.

Texturing

I refined the texturing adding more details, some layers of wear, rust and dirt. Below you can see the different layers.

Here are some detailed views.

I'm now working on the lighting and the pose of the character! I will add a little context to the scene but not as elaborate as originally planned.

Texturing WIP

I've completed a first pass of texturing on Adobe Substance Painter, but I still want to add some details and improve some parts of it. The upcoming next two days will be crucial for finalizing the work but I'm really enjoying the process!

Here are some images that I've used as reference for texturing the metallic, red-painted elements, the dark blue body and the arms.

UV

I've completed the UVs of the model and I can now finally start to texture it with Adobe Substance Painter!

I'll probably need to downsize my original idea and render a still image of the robot alone instead of an animated shot with a surrounding environment because of lack of time, but let's see!

Rig

In the past days I've quite busy with other stuff but I managed to rig the model of the robot, which was quite easy being a hard-surface model. I'm still having some issues with the cables, that I'm trying to simulate dynamically.

I had to quickly remodel the arms and the cables in order to have them in a more neutral position, a sort of "T pose", to make the rig easier.

However, I've now started working on the UVs so that I can start texturing as soon as possible!

Final model

I've finished the robot model by finalizing the fenders (a very tricky part), and adding details such as the screws, the antenna and the cables. I added two more cables on the rear right side of the robot to increase asymmetry.

I've spent some time deciding how to model the cylindrical shape right above the fender. Its purpose is not clear in the concept, and I didn't want the two meshes to visually overlap, so I tried different solutions ending up turning it into a battery and moving it a little bit upward.

The next step will be rigging the model. I want to do that before making the UVs so that if anything in the model has to be changed, I don't have to make UVs twice.

Modeling WIP.

I've added the blades, the plates on the "hands", and started to block out the shape of what I like to call the "fender" (that semi-circular object surrounding the top part of the arm). I also invented something for the back part of the robot, which is not visible in the original concept, taking inspiration by jet engines.

Modeling WIP.

I started modeling the robot in Autodesk Maya. I found quite tricky to model the helmet because of the holes and the wavy part (the white one on the concept) and the need of keeping the spherical shape of the helmet without pinches. I've made large use of supporting temporary meshes: some were used to export parts of their even topology, some, highly subdivided, used as live surfaces to stick the real shapes onto them.

For my project I'm taking inspiration from an artist that I like a lot, Ryan Talbot. I love the mood in each of his works, given by the shading and lighting of the scene and the cuteness of the robot characters. Here are some screens of his shots, that I'm using as mood and style reference.

Some months ago I wanted to develop a cute, rounded shaped, flying robot, with helicopter-like blades on the top. I tried to make my own concept but the results were not so convincing to me. I started looking for concepts online and I found a great one by Oksana Govorova, who kindly allowed me to use it for my model. I never took the time to actually start the project, and this challenge is the right opportunity for me to finally work on it! The following is the concept I'm going to use for my robot.

In order to create a similar mood to the one I'm taking as reference, I'm going to place the robot among some luminescent mushrooms, as the ones I've collected in the following reference board.

I've used Adobe Photoshop to put together the robot concept and a mix of mushroom references to obtain a concept of what the final render might look like.