Project Overview
Project Overview: The final goal was to make an animated scene where a Mad Cat MKII fights and defeats a pair of tanks.
What I Did: Animation Materials and UVW mapping Camera animation Cinematic compilation
What Other People Did: Mech model by Sam Wormer Tank model by ES3D Studios Software Tools: 3ds Max 2009, Windows Movie Maker 2
Final Video Render Time:All together, 8 hours~
System Specs:
System 1(Class): 2.13Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon X1300PRO Video Card
System 2(Home): 2.33(3.0)Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB OCZ RAM, Nvidia 8800 GTS BFG/OC2 Video Card, Windows Vista SP1
Project Timeline:
Activities and Accomplishments |
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| WEEK 1 | Gather assets | |
| WEEK 2 |
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| WEEK 3 |
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| WEEK 4 |
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| WEEK 5 |
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| WEEK 6 |
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| WEEK 7 |
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| WEEK 8 | Finish animating camera and render, piece together in windows movie maker |
My thoughts on this project :
Mech's are awesome. Not those frilly Japanese mechs, ether. I mean real mechs, hundreds of tons of metal crushing their way through the battle field with more firepower then conceivable. They are huge, slow, and mechanical. Mostly, they are awesome.
One of my favorite examples is the Mech Warriors series, based in the Battletech universe. Not all the Mech's are the bone crushing walking tanks I described, but the series has its fair share. One of the most iconic examples is the Mad Cat Mark II battle mech, an 85-ton behemoth famous for its chicken-leg chasse and dual missile packs. Its massive, relatively fast, and pretty awesome looking to boot. Perfect mech for this project, right?
I was stoked to find that a Sam Wormer hosted a beautiful model of this mech on Turbosquid for the wonderful price of free. It is intricately detailed and generally as awesome as the "real" thing. Considering this is animation project, I was in no way opposed to using this mech for my animation and avoiding makeing one my self. One of the major challenges in this project was rigging and mapping the model. The tank is thanks to ES3D Studios, which was so wonderfully modeled only for me to blow up.
The Star of the show is truly the animation. The mech in the first shot, walking something like 3 steps, probably took 4 weeks on its own. That learning curve that it took to get those steps done is what let me get the last shots done so fast. I put a lot of work into transferring a sense of weight and force in its steps, how the foot moves down, not forward, as it hits the ground. The force moving the mech is truly struggling to lift each foot. That said, the camera shot that shakes as the Mechs massive foot hits earth seals the deal as far as this consept goes.
Although nothing more then an afterthought, I was happy that the explosions came out so well. Sure they are just exploding geosphears, but the flying fragments look pretty cool.
The crushing of the tank was pretty cool, and well it wasn’t to difficult to animate, it was still satisfying to do. Thanks to Parker Nelson for the idea of shooting the camera at the end, it fits the film well.