Robot at the Laundromat

I am a recent graduate at Think Tank Training Center focusing on surfacing. I did everything in the reel except for the concept art. This whole scene was inspired by Tekkonkinkreet and slowly evolve to where it is now with guidance and feedback of my mentor, Rodrigo Janz. 

The Start

I went through many different concepts, one scope larger than the other until I landed on the Tekkinkonkreet laundromat. Something contained and able to be completed within 4 month~ish. I started with a quick 'grey block' then separated all the assets and reintroduced it back into the scene as references. 

I spent a little too much time on extra things such as rigging every single assets I created. Those doors and windows... yeah I rigged it for fun. There was a lot of editing to make the scene a little more interesting for my camera shots.

The robot

The robot is a real wold item I found at the flee market. It is the focal point of my reel and I wanted to show that I can recreate something from the real world. It was a learning curve building it for film/animation, especially giving the UV enough real-estate to hold up at a 1080hd resolution. I built it 1:1 in Maya and textured it in Mari.

The rig was also built in Maya. It function as the real world robot. You have a few action you can do on the controller: Wind up, Coil lock, Body lock and Hook bends. The wind up would roll the coil and run the gears. There is a constraint for when the coil reach its limit and the gear would stop. An expression would run the anti-wind script when the gear stops and the slip gear, the one that look like an "S," would skate over the main gear. The gear would activate the leg rotate and body rotate when animation of the wind-up is keyed. 

The Dryer

This was used as my learning curve for Mari. I revisit this dryer several time, redoing it and adding more and more story to it. 

The Tiles

The floor was an enjoyment to do. MASH was utilized to duplicate a single tile and altered with random tilt and 90 degree rotate. It has two UV sets. One for the default clean tile and a secondary for grunge mask. The mask were painted in MARI. I tried using many of Maya's native nodes to help with noise break up.

The End

This was definitely a difficult beast to tackle, with so many different programs to juggle. What I really got out of it; the project is as difficult as I make it. There still plenty I want to add to this and we'll see where it goes.