This is a complete collection of work I had done on the short film iCare by Bruno Urzi. This was also the student film I worked on at Escape Studios where we worked across the VFX and Animation departments - and I am honored to showcase the work I did for this one!
We needed to have a cute friendly looking companion robot to follow the elderly woman around in the short - which meant that a lot (and I mean a lot) of cute robot pictures were referenced to design this lil guy.
| Early Concept Art - All designs scrapped|
| iCare's intial design - this got altered as it was modelled |
| iCare's intial palette concepts |
| iCare's final concept |
| Iterations of iCare's hands |
| Pose Sheet - this helped to illustrate how the character might move during the short |
Around the same time as the design process, I was running early face rig tests, meaning I needed to create an expression sheet to follow when building the final rig. The final product was far more extensive than it clearly needed to be (there are a lot of repeating shapes shown here) but it was vital for that part of the rigging process.
| Expression Sheet - While I would usually include more poses in these sorts of documents, I needed to be able to see the face clearly so it could act as an orthographic reference later on |
Going into this stage of production, I knew I'd need to quickly familiarise myself with Maya's pre-packaged procedural tools in order to build the face - MASH being key to how the robot's face is driven.
| An early MASH Network testing the face rig concept |
It was a challenge getting the MASH network to a) fit neatly onto the robot's body mesh and b) be as user friendly and bug free as possible within the allotted time. As this was my first time using MASH for this purpose, there were plenty of quirks of the software that needed to be ironed out - such as driving curves (that create the shapes on the face) double transforming and my MASH face not appearing during test renders.
| An early draft of the face rig, for a while it didn't have filled eyes or a filled in mouth (which was its own can of worms) |
| A test animation using the body rig (built by Sebastian Petre) and the face rig together - the filled eyes were toggle-able in this build and thus animated on here |
By the end of this stage of production, the major flaws of the rig had been ironed out (and the eyes and mouth had been filled in like they are in the final short) and the face was fully expressive! It was a fun but tough rig to work on that also granted an opportunity to learn of the quirks of MASH and Arnold along the way.
| A demo animation done by yours truly, showing off the interface of the face rig and the result it produces |
As I was also rigging for two other projects while working on this one, so my attention was spread pretty thin when it came to animating. It had also been a while since I'd touched animation at this point, so my shots are a bit rough around the edges.
| One of my two shots for iCare |
I still find my self feeling proud o the work I did for this project, especially for the longer of the two shots - the first half was one of the most frustrating but satisfying motions I've ever created (the reversal part was and is still my favourite).
| One of my two shots for iCare |
There isn't really much else I can say here, this part was fun but frustrating (especially with the number of camera angle changes that occurred during this part - which led to me redoing a lot of work) - I particularly enjoyed just moving the robot up and down and in circles, having one wheel makes for some very fun body mechanics.
That last part wasn't sarcasm, this was super fun to work on :D