I was working on a short 3D animation with Aidi to submit for IPCC 2010. The original idea is to create an IP base on a few stories we discussed some time ago. But we changed our plan as we realize it is a bit too ambitious to proceed with it. More over, I am still new in 3D animation, which means I can’t help much if the animation is complicated. After some discussion, Aidi proposed “Mesinaut” and we start working on it during June.

Finally, the finalist for IPCC 2010 was announced earlier today. Sadly, our animation was not shortlisted. But this is still an interesting project for me because it is the first 3D animation that I had worked on.

Introduction

As I am not a good with words and story telling, I will just copy the brief description about Mesinaut written by Aidi in his blog post.

Mesinaut is a story about two very different robots who became unlikely friends during their journey to escape their besieged planet and in the course of their travels they discover the truth behind the attacks. The duo encounters a scenario that they must solve in order to resume their journey across the desert planet. The small robot acts as the thinker while the big robot acts as the muscle.

Concept Art

The character designs for this animation were done by 3 different person. Aidi, Daim and me. Below are the concept arts colored by me.

This is the big robot design by me. Originally it was a clean and simple robot but was change later on to have a more construction feel on it. I would like to redesign this if we win the IPCC 2010. But since we didn’t even manage to get shortlisted, so it will remain like this for now.

This smaller robot was design by Daim (Aidi’s cousin who is currently working in an animation studio at Japan). As you can see in his sketch, the “brain” part is removable and there is a CD spinning in the head when the robot start to think

This is the evil robot design by Aidi. Green color was chosen by Aidi to give it a more “military” feel.

What I did?

As I was always sidetrack to do some other projects, my contribution on this animation is actually quite limited. Things that I did were:

• 3DSMax CATMotion Rigging for Conbot and Resbot.
• Model a simple cargo container with Blender.
• Animate the starting scene when Resbot runaway from Tripod.
• Post-editing work. effects, sky, camera wiggle, sound and music (content pack purchase online).

Top image is a render from 3DSMax. Below is the final render after editing in AfterEffects. Due to lack of time, we didn’t texture the robot properly.

The Animation

Below is a youtube link for the animation. Hope you enjoy it. Comments are always welcome.

Vue Render

Company purchase a copy of Vue recently for an upcoming project. So, I play around with it with the Conbot model. I must say if I got my hand on Vue earlier, the terrain in the animation will look a lot better.