One of my most recent projects, that I finally got around to starting, involves character animating in Cinema 4D. I have a huge epic story, that I’m hoping to plan out, involving an earth now inhabited by only robots. I’ve already written quite a lot of the backstory and details about this world, fleshing out as much as I can. But my main concern however is timing and rendering. In an ideal scenario, I would like this to be a web series, with episodes about 20 mins each. But this would take many hours of work, and I don’t yet know if what I hope to achieve is worth all that time. So to start with, I am working on a teaser type trailer featuring some characters and a hint at the overall story line. It will be just under 4 minutes in length and will contain as many effects and interesting scenes as possible, to give an impression of what the web series could potentially incorporate.

Here’s a little early test render of a scene I put together quickly, to pose the characters and get a feel for the style of the world. I gave the characters a slightly cartoon look and tried to not make the models too detailed because I was worried about render times and spending too long working on one character. This shouldn’t effect the story line however, as I hope this to be really gritty and dramatic.

I ultimately chose to use only robots because I feel they are easier and quicker to animate. I also can be a lot more creative with the designs because they can in all shapes and sizes. In the story, it is set on earth many years into the future after humans had wiped themselves out. Only robots remained. These evolved and gained consciousness and emotion, just like humans.

Below is a quick test of the characters that will feature in the teaser short. Here I was testing the joints and character rigs. The white robot will be the main focus of the teaser. There will be multiple of the other 2 robots because these will be portrayed as the enemy security.

This below is another mini test, playing with the characters. Its actually an earlier test than the video above because the legs don’t animate as well and feet mess up. This made me realise I needed to rig up the legs to IK chains and not use rotation keyframing. It does show the scene a bit more though, it hadn’t been textured at this point but does show a bit of the cluttered tunnels that will feature in a majority of the teaser.

I plan to produce this teaser as soon as I can. I have other projects I want to finish in the meantime first, so I’m not sure when I’ll have this complete. With 4 months remaining of this year, I really hope its done by the start of 2017.

Posted 31 August, 2016