Robot Retribution

Wrapping up my animation class at HTC back in 2023, me and my peers were assigned our final in which we were tasked to collaborate on a short film.

Given the varied skillsets of our animation backgrounds our goal was to produce something combining everyone's talents into a final piece; while I had the most experience using Blender in my class I ended up stepping out of my comfort zone of rigging and modeling to compensate the project's environment and material design.

Pre-production

Our script was a bit ambitious featuring a few larger scale settings; though as ammeters we didn't really know how to best optimize our pipeline so the priority of work accomplished started in order of sequence until it got bit all over the place.

Thus my first assignment on the project was to block out our establishing shot of a convivence store roof; allowing the 2D team to get a portion of their work done, while the 3D team worked on their robot designs.

Following that we prioritized the parking ramp where the majority of our action and runtime took place.

When I started conceptualizing this setting I had the idea of including a spiral ramp structure built off the edge of an L-shaped building. This iteration also featured a collapsed crane that would've been utilized in a fight scene; however we realized at some point we needed to tighten the project's scope and most of the setting became redundant needing a rework.

Following that hiccup I put together the simplest parking garage I could, each level was basically the same and lacked much detail, whereas that missing detail would be concentrated on the top level where our scenes were shot.

Finally I had to put together a cityscape to tie these locations together featuring rubble and signs of urban decay. Accomplishing this I utilized a few plugin tools from VFXGuide on SuperHive, alongside my own modeling and what little particle knowhow I could muster.

Again a bit amateurly I poured a bit too much work into this setting despite how minimally it was utilized in the final project. Looking back there were a lot of issues I had with this project; from our disorganized concepts, the drastic clash of colors, inefficient visual staging, and poorly conceived shot composition.

For awhile this project kind of destroyed my confidence until I took the time to process what all went wrong.