Walk test with Ryan Lampp for the robot in our film 21 Points. Sound is just a rough scratch layer, but I usually like to add a soundbed, even for tests. This test was executed while working with Ryan at the early stages of pre-production to see how a performance would work when working with an actor standing in for the robot just offscreen. Its a buddy movie so the connection between the robot and his human has got to be really solid. For example If we lose the sense that Ryan has actual eye contact with the robot when he is talking with him then this connection will be broken. We are working extremely hard to make this work in all shots, creating a set of rules for the shoot while still not letting these rules limit us creatively.
process
first method test /
When we made this test the most important thing we resolved is that the robot would have to be left handed if the the human hits with his right to allow us get the best angles without crossing the camera line. Alembic was a key technology to move the character to C4D from Maya. Surfacing and most UV's were done in 3D coat, rendering was done using Vray and C4D R15 Team Render across a mixed network of macs and PC's.
Its not very obvious in this test but you may notice the robot has a leg design that is identical to the hind leg of a quadruped. This is called reverse knee. One thing that was especially difficult to solve was re-targeting the human biped motion capture to the robots reverse knee design. But we did and it works great.
The robot is not yet finished - at this point the robot is about 80% complete in terms of its surfaces being painted and grease and dirt being added. Part of the process will be aided by the imminent release of and update to our V-Ray render engine.