Conclusion

Throughout my final year, my understanding of the 3D/Animating principles have deepened with the help of my team member Nathan who taught me many techniques and tricks to aid me in working with Maya which i had failed to pick up so far. It is these insights which have helped to shape my own image of my future and sadly i don't think the future for me lies within the animating aspect of the media industry and instead i would like to pursue a career in the modelling and rigging of characters instead but mainly the rigging side of it all.

The Project itself went as smoothly and quickly as can be expected when computers were involved, so naturally it was a pain in the arse, but out of all the projects i have completed it is this one which i am most proud of to date which brings me to point i wish  to make. Working with a student from the VFX (Visual Effects) course has greatly increased the visual quality of the animation and i am left wondering why courses like VFX/Animation/3D character animation/Stop-Motion who are all aiming to break into a similar industry are sectioned into their own groups early on in the course and are not actively encouraged to team up and work on projects which span the classes. So many of the animation brought to life by my peers and myself have been founded on brilliant ideas but have fallen through an other areas such as sound and compositing and i strongly believe if the students were set more projects like this it would also help adequately prepare them for work within the industry and improve their ability to work as a team.

The Megazord Being a productive member of society

Compositing

Compositing is without a doubt one of my least favorite things to do on the planet and the blame falls in no small way on this project. Every step of the way up until this point was smooth sailing but when it came down to compositing both myself and Nathan have fairly good grasps on both Nuke and After effects (Compositing Software) so with our combined efforts and expertise it should have been easy. wrong. The software was a nightmare to work, with frequent crashes, errors and worst of all the dreaded file corruption. Eventually after much stress and grief we finally managed to get the video edited and pieced together. All that was left was to attach the sound effects and dialogue to the animation. However, unbenounced to us one of the video compositions of Sam our actor, decided to render itself out in 25 frames a second instead of 24. This may not seem like much of a difference but when we attached his dialogue to the video it go gradually more and more out of sync with what he was saying and it wasn't and easy fix to say the least.

Animation

With the animatic finished the next task was in all probability the most important to the project. Well it is for me anyway. I began work by cutting the entire project into segments and i aimed for around 500 frames completed a day. Firstly i animated the key frames and then went through the 500 frames i was currently working on and fine tuned them. I would like to say everything went swimmingly but that would be lying. the major problem i came across was the limit in movement of both the hands and the arms which i feel, sadly shows up in the final animation. Once the animation was completed Nathan asked me to change all of the textures for the scenery to green so we could easily composite the unwanted scenery out of the renders. Then Finally Nathan worked his magic on the shadows in the scene meaning the Megazord could cast shadows that didn't have any green to them. We then had to sit through almost two weeks of painstakingly slow rendering.....

A rendered frame of the Animation without composition

Animatic

With the rig completed and fully functioning i had to wait for a week while Nathan unwrapped all the textures on the models so i could begin work on the animating whilst he then began painting up the textures. i threw together an animatic to aid in the actual animation process as a storyboard and although it was useful we were both pushed for time so i decided not to render the animatic and instead move on to the final animating with the animatic as reference. Here are a few screen shots of the animatic in progress.

University Mellor building scene

 Megazord kicking R2D2

Megazord and Agent interview scene

With the Animatic completed we then had to Get hold of some recording equipment and  a camera to film the actor and the background we would comp into the animation. To do this we had to enlist the aid of our friend Emma Grey from the Media Production course. Emma requisitioned a HD camera, tripod, and some amazingly heavy batteries from the media department and the three of us went on a filming day around stoke. After completing the outside filming we then called in a favor with another friend from the Drama performance and Theater arts Sam Turner our very own Man in black for a spot of green screen acting.

The Joys of Rigging...

After finishing R2D2 i had to then turn my attention towards the Megazord and how i was going to go about rigging it. Rather than use a Rigging script i opted to rig it manually instead. there are a large number of Bipedal rigging scripts out on the internet and although they cut down the time it takes to rig by a significant amount, i prefer to rig each joint individually to make sure there are no kinks that get buried into the rig without me knowing. The following are Screenshots of the Rig, the Mesh and the Final Fully Rigged and skinned Megazord.

 The Mesh is on the Left and the Rig on the right

 perspective view of the above image

The Megazord having a go at the moon walk, The bulky mesh makes it harder to do the precise movements which we take for granted.

With the rigging checked off the next task for me involves creating an Animatic or a kind of moving storyboard which will make up the foundation of he final Animation.

R2D2

Another modeling job i got given was to model an R2D2 for a short scene in the animation where he gets into a falling out with the Megazord (to put it mildly) Currently im having a few issues with the textured of R2D2 in which the textures dont seem to want to stay where i put them, also i seem to be having a clipping issue on the model itself. This issue appears to be linked with camera settings and i think i have found a solution which involves importing the whole mesh into another scene.

                                        a few of the panels on the chassis still need some work

Warehouse

With our new plan set in motion myself and Nathan split the revised tasks up between ourselves. Nathan got cracking with the Unwrapping of the models so they could be textured accurately. I was tasked with modeling an interior warehouse scene for the final credit roll of the animation. The hardest part of the scene was the conveyor belts with which the Megazord will be interacting. At first i wasn't sure how i would even begin to make the conveyor belts but after a bit of a search on Google i found a few very useful tutorials.

 

                                          both the conveyor belts fully rigged and ready to go

                                                                The warehouse floor

The Megazord gets a job

Our rebooted designs for the animation now center around the megazord a while after his career with the power rangers is over and it gives a humorus insight into the rough patch of the megazords life while he was out of work and rock bottom. The animation begins with the megazord transformation being played, which then szooms out into t reveal a TV. It zooms out further to show that the TV is on a desk positioned outside, right near a werehouse. The megazord is sat on the werehouse being interviewed for a job by a normal size human. the interviewer begins to ask questions regard the megazords past work experience etc. The megazord then proceeds to lie about his past to the interview and when doing so the camera cuts to memories the megazord would rather forget. E/g proping himself up against big ben whilst he urinates up against the houses of parliment while drunk, booting R2D2 into orbit after a falling out and standing in line at the job center waiting for his dole money. eventually the megazord gets the job and as the credits run you see the megazord sitting in a factors whilst he picks up cars from one conveyor belt, sticking number plates onto them, then placing them on a parallel conveyor belt moving in the opposite direction. this action continues for the entierity of the credits. the joke here being that the interviewer is making it out like the megazord will be getting a job in the millitary but instead he ends up working at a car factory. hard times for the megazord.

Disaster

After much discussion with our university tutors myself and nathan realised that by just doing an animation entierly as a piece of homage to the Megazord would be a bad idea. We then proceeded to sit down and rethink our entire project. All was not lost however as we managed to salvage three out of the four Zords and the project has now become significantly easier in the long run regardless of the disheartening setback.

T-Rex

After much discussion about the direction of the T-Rex we eventually decided to scrap the original model and go back to the drawing boards. Nathan began drawing up different designs which incorporated different methods of transformation for the T-Rex zord so we could experiment with how it would combine with the others.

                                                                  Nathans Design

           Original Toy

As you can tell from comparing the two images above, Nathans radical re-design is both more effective in terms of combat efficiency if the T-Rex Zord were real and also infinitely more stylish. He also embedded a biological feel to the Zord by adding in artificial muscle mass.

                                                              T-Rex Zord Mesh

Triceratops

Just before i finished the Sabertooth, nath finished the Triceratops. However after a discussion we have both agreed that we need to add more changes to the zord. To do this Nath is planning on changing the head piece to make it more like a dozer blade/Plow

                                                                      Nathans Model

                                                                     Triceratops Toy

Sabertooth

The saber tooth model was my first piece of modelling i had to do for the project. I decided to make a few changes to the mesh which the toy didn't have. I replaced most of the joint wheels with large Gears/Cogs and I swapped out the shoddy lazer gun for a large Howitzer Cannon instead! With the Mesh almost complete I now have to put aside this model and move onto the pterodactyl. Once all the models are finished we must then move on to texturing, rigging, animating and finally compositing.

                                                                          My Mesh
 

                                                                          The Toy

Reference Materials

Me and Nath managed to borrow one of the original Megazord models from a friend to help as reference when modelling the original models. After a bit of play with the toys we realized that if we modeled it Exactly to the toys specifications it would barley be able to move, let alone transform. To say the toy was badly designed is an understatement.

With that in mind we decided that only two of the zords (The Triceratops and the saber tooth) were almost good to go, with the addition of a few much needed joints. We are currently in the Process of designing/revamping the zords.

 

The Megazord toys

Description

For this Project I have teamed up with Visual effects (VFX) student Nathan Parish who will be co leader in Project Megazord. after much discussion about which idea to go with we both agreed on the Megazord project. This was partly because it would both challenge us and push our abilities but mainly because we both grew up watching the original series of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers and to be able to recreate the Megazord and bring it up to date is a fitting homage to something which brought us so much amusement when we were young.

Originally we were planning on copying the old transformation scene in Power Rangers where all the smaller Dino-Zords transform and combine to make the Megazord. Because we were attempting to make the animation as close to the original as possible we began to realize it would look rather shabby if we just used the same poor style of animating which they used originally. So after some discussions with our tutors we decided to not only bring the Megazord back to life . but to also to even the odds with some state of the art firepower.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqNtsQebyuA    =   Original transformation

(*Note we were going to miss out any footage with the power rangers in and concentrate on the megazord itself)