Animating and Rendering

Ok so ive just been experimenting with a range of different ideas and poses for my animation. SInce it is a spider I really want to capture the essence of the war machine acting and interacting with the environment like an actual spider. The key I believe is to make it interact and become part of the environment. CG that sticks out is easily spotted by the human eye as we have all seen in old low budget films.

I had to take into consideration a lot of aspects in the shot because of its movement. I had to also consider a lot of aspects that would affect the placement of the spider. Because I used N cloth on the model and I had not programmed colliders very well with the fabric I could not mount the spider on the wall as expected as it meant the cloth would get tangled in the geometry. This was really frustrating because I didn't want to loose the cloth because it gave the robot that little bit more realism. It would have been ideal if I had the spider climbing down the wall when it spotted the soldier peeking around the corner.

Another thing to concider was what mood did I want the scene to portray? I really wanted the solider to feel as though he was so insignificant in comparison to the robot/s. The robot showed absolutely no fear in the solider. I wanted to animate the spider as though it was stalking prey. For this I studied the movements of spiders and other stalking animals. After all this I decided to place the spider onto the ground instead of the wall. This would also bring the most camera view of the spider throughout the scene.

However after animating the spider I realized that when the solider comes around the corner to shoot he points his gun upwards of the spider shooting at the windows on the wall. GREAT. So now I had to find a way around this problem. And this was when I discovered the use of referenced files in maya. It enabled to open up my creativity so much more. References basically enable you to import other maya files into another scene. So I came up with the idea to simply duplicate the large spider model and create miniature "drone" versions of the boss spider that are also out patrolling for humans. I made a copy of the original spider, re-textured it and saved it under another file. I then animated the new red spider. Then looking at the geometry on the wall I realised that I could simply duplicate/rename the animation of the red spider and recycle it to save time. Then i simply referenced in the duplicates and started each animation at different intervals to break up the movements of the spiders to make them all look different. This workflow really keeps the creativity in the scene open for edits and changes later down the track. 

Now that all the animation has been completed. I needed to set up lights. This was tricky because the scene itself was not well illuminated. It was somewhat dull and lifeless. So I just used HDR, and a low intensity rect and sphere light to replicate the lighting. I wanted to avoid the 'burnt out sun look.' From here I rendered out all the different passes on different render layers in maya. I rendered the shadows and the the spider separately so I had more control over them in post. These passes including rgb, light selections, reflection, specular, World_XYZ, and velocity.

All of these passes are made to ensure the most control in post and make blending the object far more efficient. These passes are infused inside a multi-channel EXR file which can be split apart in nuke.