Megaman X project

kenha604

EDIT:
Project is complete! Here's the video:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIfhwPAX8A"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIfhwPAX8A[/ame]

If you enjoyed it, you can watch my full demo reel with a "boss" character at the end in UDK here



Hi everyone, my name is Ken Ha (ken-ha.com) and I'm currently a student, soon to be graduating, from Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Megaman was a big part of my childhood and I absolutely loved him as a character. For my demo reel I wanted to bring what I had imagined as a child to realization.

This project started December 26th, shortly after my birthday, and is close to completion, just in time for my graduation at the end of this month. It's scope became larger then I had originally dared, but the challenges were exciting and allowed me to experience areas and disciplines I would have otherwise never seen.

I will be posting my progress chronologically, starting with concept and of course, Megaman.

I gathered a lot of references of Megaman and robots to keep him stylized but with a sense of reality. I scrapped my first few ideas


I settled on this one


I began with box modeling in Maya. I wanted to nail my topology as quickly as I could.





For the face I used recent Ender's game star Asa Butterfield as reference. For time's sake I started from an old head of mine.

pixelpatron

The realistic face is creeping me out.....reminds me of.....

ysalex

Cool stuff man, looks like you have a good handle on what you want to do. Only crit for now is that the skull is looking a little misshapen over the eyebrows, and the neck is pinching inwards a bit. It will be hard to pull off a realistic face for MM but with some finesse you'll be fine. A little but of stylization wouldn't hurt the overall either.

Looking good so far, and megaman x4 is easily my favorite sidescroller of all time.

kenha604

Thanks for the feedback, I'm posting retroactively so it is too late to make any changes; however I do appreciate critique for my future projects.

For what I had planned I needed a enemy of some sorts. Because of time constraints I settled on a fairly simple design, as you can see by the sloppiness of the concept art I created.

Ball De Voux



UV'ing and layout took quite a while; I wanted to get as much as I could out of my texture maps. I then proceeded to bake out all the individual pieces in xNormal in preparation for texturing. For texturing I used a combination of Mari, Photoshop, 3D coat, ndo, ddo, xnormals and handplane. Here are the results:

Tested in marmoset, so no transparency in these




And the texture maps


Ball De Voux



Texture Map

kenha604

At this point I had a rough idea in mind for what I wanted for the short. I kit-bashed this older environment I made which was meant to be just a display stand for Megaman earlier on in the project:


I made adjustments to the scale of the scene to allow for the wide angle shots I was looking for. With the environment taken care of, I began storyboarding.

Once I had gotten shots down that I wanted, a friend offered to piece it together as a moving storyboard; this turne out to be very helpful to communicate the timing to the animators. You can see it here:

http://youtu.be/TWpwWzJ5xgc

While this was happening another student, who was working on a rigging reel, began rigging Megaman and ball De Voux. I supervised the rigging, making adjustments so the animators would have the controls they needed to do what I had in mind.



I enlisted the help of 2 animators for the more complicated sections of the short that I comfortable doing myself as I have had little previous experience in animation; the run sequence and the jump sequence. I ended up animating the enemies and Megaman's fall.

Here's an early pass of the animation, although the video may not be live at time of post:

http://youtu.be/WBN7I-9N0Qo

Next time, lighting & rendering

kenha604

Right now I'm in the middle of compositing. These are some progress shots. I'm aiming to have it all wrapped up next week.








FULL ALBUM HERE

kenha604

It's finally done! I'll be updating the original post as well. I hope everyone enjoys it!


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIfhwPAX8A"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RIfhwPAX8A[/ame]