New Ro-Buddy draft

Just because I'm pretty impatient and I finally managed to get some time to work on this over the weekend, here's an update on Ro-Buddy. I've pieced together the first 36 seconds of what's pretty close to what I want the final product to be.

Those pipes at the beginning are still way to flat though so I'll be scouring the net for any neat embossing/bevelling tutorials or plug-ins to help give them a better shape.

After producing this concept, I'll certainly be trying to incorporate this strong lighting throughout the animation.

Very roughly lined out (I've not thought a huge amount about the bigger story for Ro-Buddy) Ro-Buddy's soul function as a robot is to connect to another robot of his kind. I've not really thought about the mechanics of this but I like the idea of the driving force of the narrative to be Ro-Buddy searching through all the pits for a robot of his kind that still operates.

I've thought of many other robot characters to tag along with Ro-Buddy including a screaming bin robot. I'll probably do a concept of that one next!

Here's another concept from the animation. I've made a custom brush in photoshop to speed up drawing the piles of robot scrap close up. For the final animation I'm sure I'll find time to do some more detailed scrap heaps in the closer shots.

3D animation experiments

I decided to try a short 3D animation test to see if I could use it convincingly in the animation. I generally like to stick to 2D compositions so this was a nice challenge for me.

I've got examples of the different stages I went through, experimenting with the lighting and textures which I hope is insightful for anyone watching!

Here's the second concept I've put together, showing the bottom of the gigantic container. It's always good to put out some detailed concepts for a video piece so there's a kind of blue-print for the colour scheme and detail involved with the final product.

I've started the concepts by trying to get the look of the first tracking shot. I'm going to try and impress heavily the stark contrast between the bottom of the shaft and the top - spilling out in to nature.

Opening Test 1

An idea I had for the opening shot to the teaser. I'd like to point out that the music in this snippet is from the fantastic 'The Social Network' and will not feature in the final product in any way. I merely wanted a neat, digital sounding track to accompany the footage!

Storyboard

I've pieced together a pretty simple storyboard here. The plan is to make a 'Teaser' trailer of sorts introducing the world these robot's inhabit. 

I'll be putting together more animation tests and pieces of concept art together for the next few posts.

Animation test 1

After figuring out the design for the character, I'll go through some simple animation
tests to see how the design works in motion.

I feel pretty happy with the way Ro-Buddy's design handles the exasperated sigh
I animated him with.

Final Designs

 

I developed the two robot characters in my favourite Adobe programme - Photoshop. I use a combination of metal textures and hand illustrated elements to put the characters together.

Design Choices

Here's the two main robots I chose from all the sketches I did. Simple and clunky!

Robot Sketches

This is how it started out! I went to the drawing pad with abandon and sketched rubbish looking robots until I was happy I'd found a couple I liked. There were many, many more pages than this but I felt this was a good summary.

I'd like to point out that this idea initially started out on a great character design job at my current place of work Twist Media. I made a whole bunch of designs which included a few robot characters and hey presto! An idea was born.