major project: Robot

As I have already pointed out, I decided to add a Giant Robot to the film, as I felt that the piece might feel more fun, and have more of a superhero feel. 

I was initially against this idea, as I knew that I would have to model the robot from scratch in Maya, which would obviously take time, and rig it, which would take more time still, especially if if the rig developed issues. But after changing my mind, I ensured the model would be a simple design, with only a few details added. 

This is the model. I based it on one of the original six sketches of Robots that I did. It has very similar in it's mechanics to a AT-ST walker from the Star wars series.  

This is the skeleton rig. This is one of the things I was worried about because I am aware of how long rigging tends to take, especially the paint-weighting. Much to my surprise however, the paint-weighting didn't take as long. I did have to re-rig the model however. 

While I was able to get the leg joints working I had trouble trying to set up the knee joints. When setting up the initial IK's, I didn't set them to the right kind of solver, (they were supposed to be rotate plane solvers, when I accidentally set them to the single chain solvers). As pole vector constraints only work with rotate-plane solvers, I had to redo the entire rig so I could add the knee controllers.     

This is the scene I constructed for the Robot to run around in.