Here are three sets of concept drawings of various animals found in Europe, with the exception of that raptor. Each set contains the actual animal study and an overlay of mechanical design. The design is quite rough. The purpose of these drawings is to get a sense of creature's silhouette. Once we have our creature, I can then move on to create the actual functional mechanical body. I was hoping Europe has more scary animals that you know will mess you up if you mange to meet one in the forest. very disappointed.... I guess we will probably end up with a mishmash of many animals.
First Set [Greyhound, Goat, Lynx, Bear, Fox]
Second Set [Wolverine, Raptor, Spanish Fighting Bull, Deer, Wolf]
Be sure to let me know if there is a particular animal you are interested in seeing 
11 Responses to “Concept - Animal Robots”
Great job with all the quick sketches. Perfect for us at the stage we are in. Perhaps you could try a mixture of different animals. Just try and keep the animal influence from European creatures.
Also we could look into some mythology of the various nations in Europe for different creature examples. They'll be fantasy be that is something the Mechanic may have access to for inspiration.
Mythology is a great idea, I will look into that.
I have a suggestion, instead of a mechanical cougar; why not pick a lioness with stylized body painting. The soldier could be a Victorian era safari hunter, hired by the railroad company to kill a troublesome monster that scared off rail road workers. He tracked down the lioness to a mountainous cave, and then he found the little girl (he couldn’t see her clearly). While trying to swindle the girl away from the dent, he got attacked by the lioness. In the struggle he felt and become cliff hanging. The Lioness approaches him but it was stopped by the little girl. As he look down to the cliff he saw the devastation of company has done as it cut, burn and destroy a path through the jungle. As he looks up he saw the girl clearly with marking similar to that of the lioness. Spirit of Africa?
I think this theme is easier to do than a village filled with buildings and rubbles. Plus a stylized painting on a stylized lioness is mysterious yet plausible compare to a bio engineered cougar. I also strongly encourage u to pick a more cartoony, Disney/pixar-esque theme for the character models. Realistic style is difficult to do and it lack the charm of an animated movie.
The story can be set up by a series of negotiation dialogue that can be heard from outside of a foreman’s office. Perhaps we can insert gags in the scene of the hunter putting on gears preparing for the mission. His room is filled with terrifying and wacky trophies. Screaming hippo head, next to frowning rhino head, next to a ku-fu panda head? Bras of different sizes and of different material (coconut, seal shells) and vary from small to ginormous size? That scene can serve as a comic relief to a more serious, and fear full scene later. As he tracking down the monster, he enters the deep dark jungle. People tend to afraid of what they cant see, and it would be a lot easier if we only show the silhouette of the monster/lioness with glowing markings, lots of growling but not a lot of animating.
I believe majority of the animation should be on the hunter
If u like the idea I will produce concept sketch for it.
Here is a quick sketch
http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/7774/hunterp.jpg
From the modeling's stand point, I don't see how it's easier. In fact, I think we actually need to model a lot more scenes/objects. You have foreman's office, hunter's place, lioness's den, and not to mention the devastated jungle that has to be very convincing in order to get your point across.
Also texturing all these objects will also be very time consuming, since we probably need to hand paint a lot of the texture to get the stylized feel of the short.
I got to agree with Vokram on this. At our past meetings we have intentionally designed a world and setting that will play to Alex's strengths, our environment modeler with industry experience. I have also insisted we only have one setting. We just don't have the time to build multiple sets. If we do, it will be at the sacrifice of quality.
Modeling entirely new characters is simply out of the question as well. It took me a good portion of my summer to model the lead character because I want something that looks good and professional:
http://crispy4004.isgreat.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/man2.png?rand=529116019
(I'm avoiding displacement maps so we run into less out of memory Rendering issues.)
We can make changes, but they'll have to be within the framework of what is already built. Like for instance adding the glasses and an empty weapon harness.
If we were to change his character completely, we would either have to spend half to a full semester rebuilding everything or pump out something tacky like this:
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5668/0003dmodelexplorere204.jpg
Understand that even if we went cartoony, every from the characters to the World would need to be redesigned and remodeled from the ground up. Not to mention starting over from ground zero on Rigging.
The plan is to have a basic rig in place for everything after the first few weeks of class. If we do completely new characters, that might not happen till the end of the semester, which is WAY to late. We NEED to be able to start animating ASAP!
I got my hands full as it is finishing the girl model and finish texturing both human characters. That alone is going to keep me very busy.
Anyways that's my 2 cents.
Actually I had a different vision, the forest would be an aerial view done with low polygons, the majority of the trees would be done abstractly, similar to Honda Contour commercial.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8GpMyKN7_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euN3osWjDGo
it is true that the main character model need some works, but since it is abstract it need not to be articulated with lots of facial feature.
The foreman office is only outside, no interior. The cave is dark and need not much modeling.
The girl wore a tribal mask, again minimalist model. The trophy cabin may need some work but it is do able in 8 weeks since it need no rigging.
The only problem I had with ur art direction is it is trying to imitates human too closely. Even with big budget production titles, like Polar Express or Christmas Carol, the characters are uncanny and creepy because human are very good at facial recognition.
Perhaps you are right, it is too late.
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