IRON DUKES
A new range of giant robot toys from CMZ Toys, a division of CMZ Heavy Industries. Action figures sold separately.
*Plutonium Power Pellets not included.
Summary: I learned about HDRI lighting and PBR rendering as well as doing more modelling and animation in Blender.
*Plutonium Power Pellets not included.
Summary: I learned about HDRI lighting and PBR rendering as well as doing more modelling and animation in Blender.
IRON DUKES: Goals
This was another quick and dirty project building on skills I'd gained in the previous 2. The main goals were better rendering and longer animations. As an eighties child my love of giant robots was an easy inspiration. I don't see entering this project in any film festivals, this was again just a learning exercise for me.
"Concept" Sketch
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An early test render of the completed robot
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PBR & HDR Rendering for Control, Consistency and Realism
In my previous project The Vindigo, I had been frustrated by the rendering aspect of the project. No matter which parameters I played with, the deer skull was always too bright and the rest of the Wendigo too dark. Too many magic numbers in the rendering pipeline. For IRON DUKES I spent the time to implement a PBR Physically Based Rendering pipeline in Nodes (Blenders node based shading language used in Cycles, Blenders GPU accelerated ray tracer) using HDRI domes for lighting. The result is more consistent shading that works more consistently across a broad range of lighting scenarios.
For the most part I copied the shaders from Blender Guru to get this working.
The HDR domes function a bit like how you'd expect an environment map to work but are 32bit per channel instead of 8bit, this gives the dynamic range needed for realistic lighting from a dome.
For the most part I copied the shaders from Blender Guru to get this working.
The HDR domes function a bit like how you'd expect an environment map to work but are 32bit per channel instead of 8bit, this gives the dynamic range needed for realistic lighting from a dome.
Dielectric shader in Nodes
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HDR Environment Texture as a source of world lighting
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Next Steps
I don't feel like I made much progress with animation on this project. I'm still mostly doing key frame animation just like for a stop motion project although with few key frames. I want to do more procedural and physically based animation for my next character.
I was lazy on this project. I didn't story board it ahead of time and quickly ran out of ideas to do with the robots which is why it's so short. I need to force myself to previz stuff upfront.
I also want to have a go at generating my own HDRI domes.
I was lazy on this project. I didn't story board it ahead of time and quickly ran out of ideas to do with the robots which is why it's so short. I need to force myself to previz stuff upfront.
I also want to have a go at generating my own HDRI domes.
A Variety of Images from the Project
These are just some pictures I found in the project directory that might be of interest.
