Transforming Clio W.I.P.

[fatgav]

So; I thought I'd killed my car...

For my first car model, I decided to have a crack at my own Renault Clio, as 1: I found some nice, clear reference planes & 2: I could take as many photos as I needed of it
I'd basically finished the exterior & made a start on the interior when it all went very strange looking one night. Odd shapes everywhere & nothing would render without big holes in
Scroll down 6 months & I came across the file & realised that I'd managed to destroy it with some ill-advised playing with bindings, keyframes & X-form reset.

So I fixed it

As I did so, I became mildly obsessed with making a transformer from it; so I thought I'd have a go & make a WIP thread out of that.

Here are some pics of the car as it stands, including a rather over-lit materials test (in which you can see the one remaining part I missed while I was fixing all the X-form related normal problems...grrr)





Now I'm going to try and squeeze in some sort of robot framework. I'm determined to do this in such a way thatnone of the robot is visible in car mode (just because there're so many people on youtube arguing that it's not possible. As I said, grrr).

Cheers, Gav.

Comments, please

[The Lizard]

Nice work! Being your first car model, it absolutely looks amazing!
Really like your geometry and topology , nice quads and smooth mesh on the clay render. On the last render, have you tried HDRI? Because maybe the car is a little to shiny and stands out from the background a little to much. If you could make the render a little more smooth and take a look on the composition with the background. But anyways, really great job, keep it up!

[fatgav]

@ Lizard: Thanks muchly for the niceness :P
Actually, both the backgrounds are HDRs from off the net. The scene has a ground plane with a matte/shadow applied, an mr omni for the shadow (which is pointing backwards in the glory shot 'cause I forgot to flip the image to use in max!) & a sky to light the scene (using the environment map). I'm still new to using HDRs & still getting to grips with the various settings & I think it was over-lit 'cause I upped the HDR output multiplier without lowering the sky's intensity to compensate. I think

OK...

I have a rough idea of where I want certain car parts to end up on my robot. Specifically; the boot section kinda looks like feet to me, which means the front end will be the torso & arms. Also the horiz. bars on the front air vent thing (very techy, me...) remind me vaguely of woverine-style claws, so that puts the shoulders round about the front wheels. So the only place to put the body & head without filling the cab is the engine area.

Given all that, I've made a rough engine block / torso that fits about right in the car.



Then I dragged out a biped to match that block, and used THAT to lay out a (very) low poly robot skeleton to get the robot proportions right in themselves... I'll worry about fitting it all in the car later!




Right, I think next up I'm going to muck about for a bit & rough out what bits will end up where.

Byeeeeeeeeee

Let the nitpicking commence

G.

[fatgav]

So this...



...is what I will grandly call "concept art". All I've done is pose the robot parts and arrange the larger bits of car near them, to get a feel for what might fit where.

I quite like the overall look, although how much moves around depends to a large extent on what ends up near which limb once the robot is folded into the car. I'm already fairly sure the forearms will need to shorten like pistons to fit the width of the car, for instance. Also, the neck is unlikely to be made from the seats' headrests as it is in this pic

BTW; yes I know that's a very poor attempt at an autobot (TM? r? Who knows; probably both...) logo on the chest. Spent a little too long staring at it working things out & the edges started to look like the beginnings of one. So I guess this is going to be a goodie not a baddie

Now the fun begins... Can I fold it up inside the car? Need to revise my origami. Meshigami? Polygami? (no, that's something else I think)

G.

[fatgav]

Haven't got as much done as I wanted today... life getting in the way again
Each half of each limb now acts like a piston in order to squash them up inside the available space. I'm thinking that the rear doors might have to be non functional as the knees have ended up near the back of the roof.

So far I've set up the basic leg transformation. I'm not going to worry about too many struts etc for now; all I'm doing is binding things together and moving the car parts to where they need to be in a logical way, such that they don't intersect with one another or just fly from a to b.

Click the pic for a small preview render:




G.

[Scott M C4D]

Interesing to see how the animation of the part cars parts are animatd in conjunction of the pistons. Looks like you have been watching Transformers or that Citron advert for study Apart from the super low resolution and compression it looks pretty good.

Not really keen on the colour choice on the robot, the colours do seem to clash with each other somewhat( probably an issue with your sky / lighting ), nice modelling of the car however.

[fatgav]

@Scott: Yeah, I rendered the viewport preview at 320x256 to keep the filesize down but then I didn't know that photobucket would re-encode it to flash when I uploaded it... Ho hum. I'm replacing the video with a better quality one a.t.m.

Re the colours; I was fiddling around trying to get that sort of coloured, anodised metal look but I guess it just came out pink I tend to tweak colours / textures on every render to try out ideas...
I was actually initially aiming for racing green for the bodywork but I've lightened it somewhat over time, 'cause I couldn't get it to read very well without loads of light.

G.

[TF242]

It would look much better if you would project some sense of weight and gravity into your animation. For example, instead of the legs becoming a frog-like-dangling limbs, have the feet planted on the ground and have the mechanism work its way to the top. What do you think?

[aboveAverage]

I think he's still got a long way to go to finesse the animation. But he's convinced me it can done.

Traditionally Transformers just fling themselves up into the air magically and transform in mid-air while spinning and ****. So that takes care of the problem of meticulously propping the thing up and getting its feet planted in a realistic way as it transforms. I think that would be a perfectly acceptable shortcut. Add a rotation layer to the animation. It's not supposed to make sense. It's just supposed to look cool. It also needs to happen really fast, and it will be all the more convincing; lots of motion blur and maybe some camera shake. (You get those for 'free')

[Mtg_Kirin]

ya i really like what you have now. Would love to see it faster and the entire body.