E.T. - Extra Technological

THE HOME STRETCH:

Robot Meets Life Meets Cumulative Final Project

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Meet Robo: A rising star in the student movie clip industry. While he may not appear to be much, it was our task to give him his premier debut.

Well, maybe that wasn't exactly the outline of the project, but it's pretty close. Our real assignment was to apply all that we have learned into a group project. These new skills we aimed to apply were skills like 3D modeling, lighting, using a green screen, and special effects. My team: Jessica Love, Jessie Blom, and myself. With our combined powers, we got down to business.

To start off, we dove into the essence of the plot: the storyboard. Since storyboarding is something I particularly like to do, I took charge and scribbled our cheesy ideas down. (Now, I know my art can be better than this, but we didn't want to spend so much time on this) We came up with the idea of parodying that one scene from E.T., but with a robot on another planet. Robots: what could possibly go wrong? (Maya, that's what, but more about that later)

We went though a few hardcore rounds of 'nose-goes' and Jessica came out as our actor. So, while my comrades trekked down to the green screen studio, I stayed behind as our resident "Maya Master". For those unfamiliar, Autodesk Maya is a  3D modeling program, and the one we happened to have in the classroom. It's not a bad program, but it does have it's quirks. Some of those quirks, I've found, can be rather, or more accurately, extremely frustrating. But we'll get to that story.

Looks OK now, but...

I had an absolute blast modeling our resident star in Maya. Being a robot, he was easily composed of inorganic shapes which are much easier to make in maya than say, a hand. The special touch I added this time was parenting. 

Parenting, beyond the maternal and paternal varieties, is the act of taking one shape, and sticking it to another shape. This means that, if I move the parent shape, all child shapes below it will move, but not any shapes that the parent is parented. it's like a big tree, branches of children extending from the one, mighty parent at the bottom. If that shape moves, all the rest follow. This was crucial to having our robot move since who would want a robot whose elbow didn't move with it's shoulder? or its torso? No one, that's who. I put my heart and soul into perfecting our co-star.

Look at this absolute mess

The final trial on the modeling before animation was the wrists. (You can see they don't move in the final product) 

This was a rather blunt showcase of one of maya's specialties: Screwing up the simple stuff. I mean, just look at what it did to poor Pasted_cylinder_RWrist. 

Complete disaster. 

But, nevertheless, I persevered and came out with our amazing robot: Robo. A few shiny textures later and we were on the fast track.

ROBO in his completed glory

On the flip side of our team, we'd gathered our green screen shots together to key them out. By 'key out', I mean remove that bright green color from the background and replace with with something cool.

After compiling our efforts, we added the nifty sounds of Celldweller's The Wings of Icarus and Viola, we had our project. (It's a cool track, I'd listen to the whole thing if the clip interests you, it's interesting music for sure)

This project, overall, has taught me some of the more in depth abilities of Maya. I learned how to apply my knowledge of shapes, Booleans, parenting, and even aligning to make the robot reach it's highest degree of excellence. Outside of my new-found technical prowess, We, as a team, also gained more experience in team synergy and division of labor. (This is something I need more practice in for sure)

For future projects, I feel that I'd like to keep with the group dynamic we had for this one, but with more communication. I felt it may have been smart to check each other more often so that we are all and the same track. I also feel that, as we all improve in our chosen tracks, that we'll find even more smooth and easy teamwork styles to use. I await being able to work with the people I have seen in the future. And without further ado: our project: