[wEvil]

http://www.wevil-web.co.uk/bw2.avi  *edit* - about 2mb, Divx or Xvid - can't remember which

Little project i'm working on for my reel - it was a competition entry for another site last year but i've had another go at tweaking it around.

Oh yeah - all done in XSI for those of you with doubts

[mikhael]

I dunno, wEvil. It looks... gooey. I don't know how better to put it.

[Odyssey]

[color=cc9900]"Robot in an industrial-grade kiln"?
It's nice, and amazing work, but just a bit too smooth for my liking.[/color]

[Nico]

Same here
I would suggest to add some randomness to the city, coz it's obvious you've mirrored it
Weeee for the raytracing n that pic, btw

[Deepblue]

First thought...

What the hell?

[wEvil]

City?  yeah, that was a WIP... i still have to actually design the cityscape for it.... whee for a photo excursion to london methinks

[vyper]

Nice, although the file only lasted about 3 seconds for me, which is odd.

[Nico]

Indeed: it's 18 seconds long.
Mmh, Wevil, I'd sugest you do a little change to teh walk gesture of the mech:
right now it seems that the body weights nothing, it stays horizontal when the mech is raising a leg. it should bend down on that side. Of course that would make the leg go lower, so the mech should, at the same time, lean a bit toward the oposed side.
Well, that's how I do it, anyway, figured it made for a more realistic motion.

[mikhael]

Venom is right. The animation doesn't feel right, becuase there's no motion to the body. There's three independent things here: the body and each of the legs. Its just a coincidence that they happen to be travelling together in the same direction at the same time. They don't appear to be cohesive.

[icespeed]

the machine _looks_ cool. it reminds me of- well, you know those little silver metal symbols on cars, their company logos? like the toyota circles or the h for hyundai or whatever. that metal looks like those.

[Nico]

figureheads?
mmh, guess that would apply more to real "figures" like the jaguar's... jaguar, in fact.

[wEvil]

http://www.wevil-web.co.uk/bw3.avi  - 2.2mb Xvid  (i checked this time, heh)

Looks better, thanks for pointing it out

The one problem is the legs can't move to far from side to side mostly because of the way those retainers on the shoulders are constructed.

[Nico]

Better, but it should lean the other way
But there's no need to lean more, you just have to see that the structure is acting against gravity. The amount you have there is about enough, I think.

[diamondgeezer]

Good God! A robotic Shivan! Well... sort of. Have those two raised legs comming over the top of it and you're sorted

[wEvil]

http://www.wevil-web.co.uk/bw4.avi - 2.24mb Xvid

Corrected (oops)

[Nico]

Ah, now that's what i'm talking about Well it should start leaning the other way only when the leg is starting to raise, but I guess that would be really *****ing for details there. Looks already quite convinging now
are you gonna make it lay waste on its path? I can picture very well those little arms firing beams left and right as the mech is walking forward, destroying the buildings around it
Add some people running away and that would make an awesome scene
That makes a lot of ":)" smileys, but I don't care

There's only one thing I'd change on the design ( not judging from my own taste, I mean ): change the red+chrome color scheme, coz that screams "matrix" to me ( or maybe that's what you aim for, and in that case I'll just shut up )

[wEvil]

Welllll... currently i'm also playing around with scripted ops for XSI's particle system (sortof a must if you want to be able to make anything remotely useful with them) so either its going to be a tracer gun...orr...I did play around with XSI's volume lightning shader but quite frankly it sucked... and looking into it a bit more to make it work i realised i'd pretty much have to write my own shader!

As for the red/chrome... i did look into it but the problem is that red/chrome are used for a reason...green/chrome makes it look like an alien for instance, not as mean but you know all that colour theory blabber.

Beams are another good idea...i didnt think i could pull them off but now you mention it.
Grrn.

The problem with working the way I do now is there's no set way of doing it, you just get a bunch of what on the surface looks like really skanky modules and you have to build something out of it - glow in XSI sucks, i have to render out in layers and use a compositor!   Sure i can get much better effects (read motion picture quality)  faster... but....humm - i'll post up something tomorrow - thanks again for the crits

P.S - Does anyone have a decent (IE realistic) mashed-up car model i can use as target practise?

[Nico]

How do glows on a simple particle look like? If they look ok ( should look better than on a whole mesh coz it's simpler ), make your particle emiter spawn a lot of particles, so basically that creates a continuous stream of fire. With some randomness, it can look very cool ( not a pure, straight beam, but more like a wavy fireburst ).
In the worst case, create a nice glow map, an opacity map to go with it, crank up the selfillumination to 100%, and use the map on the particles, that will do about the same ( if possible, add some color blend so all the particles blend with each other ).

[wEvil]

It's worse than that - i have to create a pass with the object-to-be-glowed set as a constant material, render it out and gaussian blur it then composit it back at the end with a hue offset/screen blend (a la photoshop)

Because particles in XSI are rendered as volumes you can't actually apply glows at all except using the above technique, so i'll just have to see how it turns out