[Titan]

   Last year, I sort of fell out of posting here and keeping up with the community. This is partially because of my involvement with my high school's FIRST robotics team, which took up a lot of my time (I was head of the Drivetrain subteam and one of the Mechanical subteam leaders) and also provided enough of a social outlet that I had less of a need to talk with you guys. Since then, there have been several times I've wanted to post here, but I felt rather uncomfortable coming back for some reason. Eventually I decided I wasn't going to come back until I had something to show.
   Near the end of February, I decided to start working on an animation for the '2012 FRC 3DS Max Student Safety Animation Award'. I didn't have any experience in 3DS Max, so I began working in Blender 2.6, something I had a bit of experience with first due to several failed (or rather, aborted) attempts to mod FSO, followed by a game design course at my high school. Despite that, I had to basically learn everything from the ground up, first modeling techniques, then rigging, and finally animating. At long last, I'd like to share this nearly finished character that will be used in the animation.

A 360 view of the character
Walk cycle I did to test his rigging as well as practice animating. Notice how his eyes move. A render of this is currently up at our local airport, courtesy my art teacher, who's letting me work on this as an independent study.
This year's winning animation, by team 3705. For reference. This was not done by my team; we've never submitted for this.

   He (doesn't have a name yet) is more or less meant to be the 'student' character. My general plan is to have him, accompanied by a 'mentor' character, build an FRC robot via a montage. Of note, keeping with the theme of safety, his eyes are made of safety glasses that deform via an armature. Currently I have set him aside, seeing as he's finished, in order to model our workshop, which will be the setting for the animation.
   Because of my work for this, I have become the de-facto leader of our new Animation subteam, which should be interesting. I'd like to conclude by saying this very well might be the first project I will ever finish due to my own volition. Eventually, I'll need to move him (and possibly redo most of the rigging, etc) into 3DS Max. If we win, it will be shown on FRC Kickoff day in January 2013, as well as during the opening ceremonies of every 2013 regional and the 2013 championships.

[Jeff Vader]

Sweet merciful holy jesus ****.

HI. o/

[Snail]

Damn dude that's cool stuff.

[Retsof]

I wondered where you went off too.  That's some nice stuff you got going there.

[bobbtmann]

That was a great safety video. It makes being safe fun. Good luck with finishing it!

[Titan]

That was a great safety video. It makes being safe fun. Good luck with finishing it!

The last video I posted was the one that won this year. We've never submitted.

[Legate Damar]

Since you can model now, do you think you would ever do some ship making for FSO?

[Titan]

Since you can model now, do you think you would ever do some ship making for FSO?

I dunno, maybe someday. I'm still the same person though; I'd probably get bored with it.

EDIT: Another small project I'm working on. This year's FRC game is basically robots playing basketball. I'm on our teams pit crew, which means spending a lot of time chilling in the pit while the robot is out during matches. During one such interlude, I took one of the game pieces we had laying around, and drew a face on it with sharpie. We decided to name it Wilson, and it is now our pit's mascot, and will be sitting on a shelf out front at the championships in St. Louis next week. I got permission to paint him, and so here is the nearly finished result. I have to go back and redo the sharpie, but otherwise he came out ok. Apologies for the horrible quality; I took it with my iPod.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Titan]

Kay, been working on the environment a bit. I'm pretty much modeling our workshop with minor changes here and there (sliding doors that go woosh, for example) from memory, which has resulted in several details getting effed up royally, but it still looks ok IMO. I have no idea wtf is wrong with the wall in the second image, since the walls, floor, cabinets, ceiling, and sink counter are all a single connected mesh, so I have no idea how the sun is showing on it.

EDIT: OH CRAP! I thought I'd rendered those at half res, sorry!

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Cobra]

Sweet merciful crap.

[bobbtmann]

That's a cool faucet.

[Titan]

That's a cool faucet.

Oh! Forgot that was in there. Yeah, I made a faucet, and my friend said he preferred the taps to be on the wall instead of the counter, so I put them there. Then he said he wanted a shower, so I extended it up and out a bunch, and then he still wasn't happy, so I made him a faucet out of the Blender monkey that used to give me nightmares. 

[FreeSpaceFreak]

That faucet is a great touch, please do keep it - an in-joke to the Blender users who'll notice.

The sun issue... Face normals? Material settings?

[Titan]

I figured it out with help from a friend who actually knows what he's doing; he's 16 like me but is the founder/developer of the AniMiku software 
Anyways, he said that you needed two walls to properly make the lighting work light that, so I made a large box that surrounded the rooms, and made a hole for the windows. Works perfect now.

[Titan]

Test render of everything put together, using the walk cycle I've already made.
I'm more or less done with the environment/shop. There's stuff missing, but I decided that I'd get to work on the next part of the animation, and anything else could be modeled in as needed or if I have time before the deadline. And yes, I know his feet push through the floor. I'm going to solve that as well as smooth the camera tracking so that I can submit it for our student film festival, even though it's only a couple seconds long.