The Rookies Band

Final submission, still warm renders, without any post production, hope you like it!

Last minute add-ons before final render:

1. Added some subtle camera shake with noise function, applied trough expression editor; needed to cast the Camera into locator to keep it in place

2. The background flags needed some life, so I've used nCloth and applied some subtle wind to give them extra texture, not too much just to break the stilness

3. Motion trails 

Since the animation is in 24fps and the Drummer is pretty fast, I wanted to emphasize the drumstick movement and created motion trail rig. It's basically a simple polygon plane -> skinned to 20 joints -> joints contrained to 2 locators which has been attached to drumstick also by constrains. Material with opacity to create nice fade out effect.

The next step is to bake keys on the joints and offset them with dope sheet

and final effect:

4. Shaders

and I've found some time to prepare proper Material Shader for the robots - to give them something more like a car paint. Also modified the guitar strings, now they are more subtle.

I've also spend a lot of time trying to add Motion Blur, some Depth of Field or Fog to pump up the whole scene but it turns out that Arnold is pretty lame with that, and instead it creates a lot of noise in the renders and trying reducing it by increasing AA jumps the render times to the extreme so it was not worth it...

Time to light up the scene - some light setup from shot1

Render: Key light + Fill 1 (left hand) + Fill 2 (right hand) + Fill 3 (guitar)

if I will have more time I will definetly get back and work more on those textures

Final models of  guitars, drumset and speakers - these are very simple models since Iam just simple animator not modeller ;)

also , I've added some materials for the band and made some test renders with Arnold in Maya. Decided to differentiate them by colors RGBV - Red, Green, Blue & Violet 

Animation pass

Some guitar proxy rigs, so I have something to animate, later to be replaced with proper models:

and simple bass drum pedal

Hello, this is my entry in Animation category. After some initial research, testing different ideas I've come with this concept of a rock band of 4 robots playing a concert. I was heavilly inspired by bands like AC/DC or Foo Fighters. 

Some references of cool guitars, tabs (hand gestures) and shots:

I've created initial layout of the scene, placing of the actors, there will be 3 guitarist and 1 drummer:

Found some royalty free classic rock music - wanted some strong with kick in it, and after testing out different camera angles/shots and lenses I've prepared previs with sound to test the whole sequence: