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Cambot -Memory

Story:

Cambot,  short for Camera Robot, is a type of robot that will go around and shoot photos under its owner's command. 

An abandoned Cambot - NO. 406, however, had a glitch when it was made. It doesn't follow orders, and instead, it likes taking photos of things it finds interesting or attractive.

Modeling:

I first created a simple mesh based on the concept sketch I drew. Then I started drawing lines and dots on the rendered image to explore different designs. Once I was happy with the look. I began crafting the model to refine the model details.

Surfacing:

Texturing was done in Mari. I tried creating the water droplets on the robot using particles, but that was too expensive to render, so I decided to go with the texturing approach. I exported a neutral-pose mesh for painting the generic maps such as dif, bmp, spc, and spc roughness, and then I also exported a posed mesh for the rain mask because I want the water trails to follow the gravity.

Rigging and Test Animation:

I had a lot of fun rigging this dude. The rig is not perfect but at least it allows me to do quite a few cool moves.

I got a bit carried away and did a animation...Rendered with a panoramic HDR image I made on site

FX:

The rain FX was created in Maya using nParticle. For the rain streak. I randomly instanced five different streak models onto a nParticle system, so the specular of rain streaks can have some variations and appear more dynamic. 

As for the splashes, it was simluated using a simple particle collision event. Low poly dummy objects were created in order to make the particle collision simulation faster.

Lighting and Rendering:

I used a HDRI provided by sIBL to set up the basic lighting. It also gave me a decent bokeh effect when turning on the lens blur. 

I added a yellow light behind the cambot and a red light in front of it in order to mimic the traffic. Also I placed a blue-ish light on the screen left side to to mimic the city lights under the bridge.

The rain streaks and splashes were rendered as separate pass and were comped into the beauty pass in Nuke.

Main Beauty Pass without DOF

Fog Layer

Rain Streaks

Rain Splashes

Nuke Graph

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