Mech Tutorial - Remote Weapon System

Hi everyone! This post has been in the making for a good few months...

My mech video tutorial is at long last up and ready for download! I will be putting out more now, the next ones with be covering lighting and comping the model into a 2D painted/photo-textured environment to create a more of a cinematic visual. In this tutorial I cover concepting in Photoshop, designing orthogonally and using photo textures, developing the design in SketchUp, rendering in Keyshot before finally compositing in the finished visual in Photoshop.

Check the trailer bellow too. Hope you like it!

www.gumroad.com/chrisrosewarne

Quick post

Did this render a while back, thought I'd share it here, tutorial got pushed back due to work commitments but back on it now, into editing for the final push!!

It's all in the details....

So just when I had convinced myself that I had indeed competed the SketchUp model a good friend and work colleague appraised it with fresh eyes and painted out that those hydraulics would have cables and hoses connecting them. I knew this, but was taking the easy route and for the sake of an extra hour's modelling, there they are - BOOM! Hydraulic cables. I had come this far, it was foolish not to add such a cool techy detail and they really add the finishing touch!

3D model complete!! Now reaching for the colouring-in pencils....

Not enough hours in the day.... You really have to eat into your sleep time to get a suitable amount of work done to be anyway near productive. Last night I closed the lid on my laptop at 2am, a time that I consider late-ish, but not unusual for me. I tend to hang up the Wacom pen around 1am but the finish line was in sight and I wanted to wrap this stage up, so after many late nights and brief lunch time stints I'm happy to say that recording the modelling stage of the design is finally compete! I think I clocked up over 15 hours of recorded modelling, it'll have to be edited down somewhat and played two, perhaps three times actual speed with my voice over explaining what I'm doing. I feel this then necessitates a brief 20 minute real time modelling technique intro, where I cover the basic of the techniques I use, explaining arrays, components, plugins that I use and how to intersect two forms to create cool and interesting shapes. Now the real fun starts, rendering this out and matting it into a plate and painting into a cinematic frame that breathes life into it - and to do this means more late nights.... good thing I love designing and painting!

Stay tuned!

Winter Camo - Digi, digi and more digi camo.....

So this tutorial is still in the works, have to film the last stages of overall detailing as we're pretty much there from a modelling point of view, but at lunchtime today I had to allow myself the pleasure  (and it is a pleasure) of jumping into Keyshot to see where I want to take this... I had already thought about setting it in some baron, snow covered wilderness, a lonely posting for a Remote Weapon System drone. I checked out some cool winter digi-camo patterns and wrapped them onto the model and inserted a photo backplate, painted out the Jeep that was there and was struck with something that in hindsight is actually very obvious, the camo made the model hard to see against the background!! I managed a bit of a work around by adding gusts of snow to knock back the trees, this gives some visual separation and you can make out the form more...

These are not the final images of the demo but a work in progress teaser and just helping me decide where I'm taking this.

Hope you like them, more coming soon!

New gun mounts - Check!

These have been plaguing me, finding the right balance of cool tech and scale, "remote weapon systems" are great reference and I had ideas about concealed turrets that extend and rotate out, but they just started to over complicate things and look like ears! So whilst I've taken licence on the overall design I'm choosing to play down the guns, just go for that utilitarian look of hard naked tech!

More to come....

Staying late after work...

Just aren't enough hours in the day! I'm cramming them in to try and get this tutorial vid done, I thought it would be a very direct modelling approach but its been interesting as I despite having a design to work to I'm still resolving design issues on the fly, there's trial and error, software crashes and mistakes all recored, I will leave them in as I think its important to see these issues, its about resolving them when you come to them... I do have to pause the recording quite a bit, just like painters do, I have have to just step back and look at it for a while, turn it around, walk away make a coffee and come back, see it with "fresh eyes" hit pause and resume the modelling... Audio is going to have to be recorded after, I just can't talk and create, hats off to those who can! I just enjoy finding "The Zone" and losing myself in it....

Here's a little screen grab from last night

Playing with Clay.... Renders that is

A little re-posing and rendering of some old models here, read about a cool trick in Keyshot in an interview with Liz Kerby who said using the matte white plastic material with a black background creates a pseudo AO/clay render, it works a treat! I've always loved the way a clay/AO render complements the modelled forms and details, see what you think...

Surgical Robot Photoshop layer breakdown

This visual was one of my more earlier ones, the render with HDRI itself actually came out really nicely, I didn't have to insert a photo backplate, just clean up some things on the HDRI. Looking back at this, I still like the idea of having a painted smiley face on a robot, that attempt to make a big machine look less imposing and more friendly, like the hand painted murals on children's wards in Hospitals, just something about them I find insanely terrifying.... In this case I found it too distracting and I wanted the "face" to be the cool lens array, there was just too many things going especially with the blood and sparks so I left it out - but seeing this I feel an urge to use it elsewhere.... hmmmm....

Anyway, hope you like this and find it useful. 

High res  here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7994921/DOC-FRAMES.jpg

STARFISH SUB PHOTOSHOP BREAKDOWN

Out of all of my mechs this one seems to have generated the most interest and questions as to how I go about integrating the Keyshot render with a photo backplate to produce a "cinematic" visual. This is something I will cover in the upcoming video tutorials but until then I've reversed engineered my PSD file to create this breakdown of the sub visual. Hope you find this interesting and if you want to see more be sure to check out my Facebook Art page

Higher Res version here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7994921/big-page.jpg

More soon!!

www.facebook.com/chrisrosewarneart

Factory Robot breakdown

I've had some requests to show how I go about these visuals, all of which I will be covering in the up coming video tutorial, but until then I've simplified the layers so you can see the plates in these two latest renders.

Factory Robot

Hi everyone! Finally managed to finish this mech, it's a trial run at my Gumroad tutorial, 2D concept to Sketchup model, Keyshot rendering and post work in Photoshop. Just have to find the time to sit down and record this stuff! After a few renders I ended up finding some great images of the McClaren car factory interior, so slick and modern, looks like a lab, also after much experimentation with materials I ended up colouring the body this hot McClaren sports car orange, it really popped in the white lab and also lends a bit of an industrial robotic feel to it... Hope you like it, with any luck the next post will be about the tutorial! :)

Video texture

I'm love the renders I get from Keyshot but I tend to find them too "clean", I feel I need a layer of noise to bring some real world grit back into the image.... I'm dialing up the LCD video texture more here and loving the results! 

More to come!

More detail and material refinement

I'm a big fan of the Bjork video "All is full of love" by Chris Cunnigham, I love the clean aesthetic of white plastic forms covering machined black metal robotic parts, a red graphic sits so well on the surface too, it feels very Japanese somehow and yet I struggle to find the reason why... It was my initial design direction for this new mech, that black and white scheme is my default robot setting, but as the design developed its interesting to see how well the forms of the mech lend themselves to certain colour schemes. Gloss white for example is of course very bright and contrasts nicely with say matte black anodised aluminium or un-glossed carbon fibre, but as soon as your start to add bare metal next to the white, you loose the forms. I like to contrast colour and texture, you'll see this allot in motorcycle finishes, matte against gloss, dark against light, so with this in mind I decided to keep the brightness of the bare machined metalwork and darken the smooth plastic forms, shiny bright metal against a dark matte plastic, I think this is the right direction to take it - for the moment at least..... I also Googled Photoshop LCD texture and found a great tutorial to recreate that "digitised" noise which I'm loving! More to come!

Its coming....!

Little test render to see how the modelling is looking, took a photo of my screen and I'm loving the digitised noise thats appearing! Will see if I can play that up in the final renders!

Lunch time colour study

This is how I'm imagining the final render will will presented, backlit with industrial sparks casting edge light onto the mech, surface illumination with red internal lights and flares from the mounted spot lights.... Modeling next!

Great White Chase!

Hi everyone! Been a while since I posted anything due to work commitments but thanks to many late nights I've finished another machine!

I saw this amazing footage of a simple underwater camera being attacked by a great white so I wanted to create a drone sub that would attract sharks but rather than passively get bitten it would speed off whilst keeping them close enough for some awesome predatory shark footage, so I designed something that housed twin impellers, an underwater HD camera and various sensory GPS equipment - to boil it down, I wanted to create visuals of a cool sub getting chased by a great white! :)

It was modelled in Sketchup and brought into KS for some sweet renders, I searched for photo ref of great whites and imported these to use as backplates in KS, I would find and adjust an HDRI to match the lighting to the photo, its great being able to edit the HDRI and add lights in KS5, made for much less re-lighting work in Photoshop! Loving Clown Pass renders too!!!!! The render was then taken into PS, the plate was extend with many elements added and removed, painted out/in and cropped to create that cinematic wide screen look. This is how I go about producing visuals on a film when I use KS.

Unlike previous posts which were all about the model and render in all its glorious detail, these were more about the "shot", but its interesting to see how easily you can comp in a  KS render what ever the brief....

Hope you like them

Chris

Aqua Drone

Still in the early stages with this one but I've generated some cool product style visuals in attempt to pick a colour combo for the environment that I'm going to be putting it into. I'm imaging this is about a meter long (3' for all you imperial kids out there...) with 2 jet impellers and an underwater cam mounted on the belly..... Its function other than a being a remote operated jet boat with camera, its purpose for the environment visuals I'm about to do for it......? Well, stay tuned but I can say it'll involve some very fast Great White sharks!

Couldn't resist doing a little nod to one of my fave Manga films Akira, love Keneda's bike in that, hence the stickers.....

The Starfish

I was looking at some motorbikes last week and admiring the way the hard mechanics are complemented by the smooth glossy paintwork on the fiberglass body, certain areas are cut away to allow some engine parts to show, it left me with a feeling that I wanted to create something that had this seductive material combination, glossy plastic and hard machined metal... I started noodling ideas in my sketchbook and still had this tri-head mech design idea from before that I wanted to develop further so began to push this shape around, creating flowing panel lines to break up the fiberglass shells, and designing mechanical parts that would be repeated around a center - but what does the mech do....? This is probably the first time that I didn't have an idea but wanted to created interesting shapes to allow materials to be assigned and just look dam good when photographed! I created some sort of turbine elements and exhaust vents, so visually it implies some sort of flight/hovering function - a lab drone.....? Could be, I like that and it's very fitting in white, but I know I wanted to try some other colours, red is sexy, more of a nod to the Ducati bikes I was looking at, tried a yellow version and it reminded me of an ROV sub unit, so that was the theme of the environment paint up, couldn't resist putting a shark in there (Jaws still burnt into my brain from a childhood viewing...!)

Hope you enjoy it!

ROV

Mind the shark

Original SketchUp model

Idea and form that hatched in my sketch book

CIWS Sentry Gun

Enjoyed modeling this one, there is something about the heavy industrial construction of the Navy CWIS systems (Close-in weapon system) that made me want to design one of my own, and why have one gun when you can have four! This was modeled in SketchUp, rendered in Keyshot and painted into a scene in Photoshop.

The cool black product shot....

The Navy model

Desert model

Night vision shot

Original SketchUp model