My main role in the project is to make the 3D models that will be used in some clips and to animate them. The first thing I had to model was the robot arm which will be used in one of the early shots where its giving the main character his "daily dose of animatum."
I knew firstly that I was not about to build this arm from scratch so I took the human body preset from Mudbox and cut off the arm and then smoothed it out. Next was designing the arm, I knew I wanted a high tec look for the arm and not a claw type arm so I did some Google Image searching for some inspiration. The main look of the arm ended up coming from an animated show called RWBY which I have done a post about before. One of the characters has a robot arm that I liked the look of.
I went into Krita and tried to do some quick sketches of the arm for reference since there was nowhere in the show or online could I find a good shot of her arm.
When in Pre Production I did alot of test arms with just some extruding where the lighter gray areas are. I didn't end up putting balls in the finger joints in the end I just added it to the wrist and elbow. I did come to regret not adding them later on down production due to rigging but I got there in the end. During my texting phase I did a low poly version of the arm so I could get the basic design down and plan where everything would go.
As you can see here its not very good but I was just trying to get a feel for the design and placement of everything. By this point I had definitely decided on doing the balls for the wrist and elbow joints to break up the model a bit and make it more interesting. To do this I had to copy the same blank arm over from Mudbox a few times so I could use different sections from each one as I cute off different areas. I did struggle trying to get the wrist ball to fit into the hand without it going through or looking too small. And then the extruded area near the elbow was difficult trying to get both sides symmetrical. It was supposed to be curved but that proved nearly impossible so I made them straight and used the edges to make them even on both sides.
I also had to add in a stand for the arm to go on as in the scene you can see the entire arm so it would look odd if it was just floating or coming out of the wall.
Next on the list was texturing. My teacher suggested Arnold in Maya so I gave it a try, I looked at some tutorial and did some tests of different metals and messed around with the settings. After I got the hang of it I began texturing my arm for real, I went with grays and purple accents to go with the theme of our project.
I am very happy with how the textures turned out, I love the reflections on the models which was the look I wanted to go for. I also did change the stand the arm is on, I realised how impractical the other stand was so I rebuilt the top part so Its attached to the top of the arm and can move with it.
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