Monday, August 11, 2008

Domo Arrigato, Mr. Non-Autonomous Exoskeleton


So there I am, revamping an old animation project, and feeling pretty good about the whole retro idea of adding rivets for that steam punk flair, when I get asked the dumb question "Hey, what are those dudes doing?". I reply with indignation "Reading the blueprints, what else?".

After the kids quit laughing and go back to their loud music and hoola-hoops, I plop down in my rocker, take a big gulp of Ensure double fudge and admit that the idea of blueprints in space really does date me as an old coot.

So off I go to update the whole thing. First thought?
Cyber blueprints! That's the ticket. After a bit of work and a quick test render, I began to hear the youngsters' music getting louder, their hoola-hoops getting hoopier. This is not so much cyber blueprints as television for the presbyopia set. Perhaps they're selecting their dining menu for the 4:30 early bird special at the Space Cracker Barrel.



Well, if there's anything that I learned from Peter Schickele is that sometimes horribly inept plagerism can pass as originality. Set the wabac machine for 1977.



Here's the holo blueprint projector inserted in the scene (a alternate render of the lower left quadrant), showing that I've still got work to do with the transparency and glow settings.




So here it is. I'd go rub it in those punks faces, but its past their bedtime.

I miss Siggraph. *sigh*


Kelvin





Edit: Here's the final, final version to the right. kh

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That looks really good Kelvin!

khickman said...

I had a Sept 1 deadline, but I just ran out of time I could allot to working on it. I really wanted to do more with specular and color maps to make things a bit less sanitized. And the displacement maps didn't work very well on the rivets so I had to create them in the model, which was very wasteful of polygons. Plus, the spacemen have pretty lame poses to keep them from exhibiting artifacts at the hurriedly designed joints.

Still, I am 95% satisfied with it. I may do a 15 second render of the scene before I put the project to sleep in the archive.

Hope you dudes had a blast at Siggraph.

Kelvin