Robot Dog (WIP) #2

Attended the Blender Conference this weekend. Was fantastic to see and talk to so many other people who love the software. As well as catching up with some of the Durian team and giving a few talks with Beorn and Lee about the animation in Sintel.

So now that the conference over and the hangover is kicking. Ive got a day and a half to kick around the studio and make use of working on this dude on something other than my shitty little laptop. Some of you guys from the conference who dropped in through the day got to see this happen and meet me!

Lots more modeling, lots more rigging.

Put in the pipes and tubes along the joints of the arms. Coming off the wrists into each of the fingers and up around the elbow. All tubes done using a simple cylinder arrayed up with length fixed to each of the splines they were then deformed across. Each spline was then locked to the different parts of the model with hooks.

For an extra bit of fun on the elbow, where the canister pipe comes into the shoulder piece, i created a little cog which rotates as the pipe slides in and out of it as the arm deforms. Set this up with an action constraint on the bone holding the cog influenced by the rotation of the forearm. Then i could tweak the curve in the driver action to get it rotating to match the amount of pipe coming through.

Did some extra modeling throughout the model too. Mostly in the front half of the model. Pipes in the arms, refined the shape of the shoulder piece, tweaked the V6 body a little, gave the guy a tail (very basic) and beefed up the neck.

For the neck i used two spine pieces, some bolted clamps and some wire going to an aerial on his head. Wire deformed same way as the arm tubes, neck is a 2 piece bone chain deformed by one main bone through some copy rot's on half influence (This is also how i usually setup spines in more organic characters, then with some drivers, i can adjust the bend of the spine with a slider. keeping it all in the one bone)

Rigging wise i set up the fingers and the drivers for the FK/IK switches and hinges of the head and torso. Also took advantage of a comp that can actually play back in real time and did a run cycle. Not quite finished yet though. Got a little more time tomorrow, will probably put some more detail into the back half of the model and finish off the run cycle. Till next time!

-Jez