Ninja Vs. Robot

You may have noticed a mysterious new image on our front page. A year ago, when we first started putting ideas together for the site, we wanted to have some playful robot characters doing various tasks similar to what we have now on our "Projects" page. This was one of my robot designs that never got used, so I just archived it and forgot about it until just a couple months ago. I thought it would be fun to take it into zbrush and add some details to it and make it look HUGE. I got rid of the antenna and put in a bunch of seams and small details.

Once the model was finished I thought it would be cool to have it in a scene destroying a city. I made a bunch of quick buildings and arranged them to create an interesting composition from the camera's perspective. I kept thinking it would be cool to have something small jumping at the robot so I made an overpass-type ramp leading up to the robot. Once I felt like I had a good amount of objects in my scene, I set up a sun light and some under lighting for a possible fire burning below him. Initially, it was going to be a daytime scene but I thought it looked better at night. The first render I did was a standard mental ray render with a key light and some warm light underneath for the fire. The next was just a global illumination pass to get the ambient sky light, shadows and some bounced light. The third was just to get some warm colors from the fire down below. After playing around with blend modes in photoshop, I ended up with a good enough result to build upon.

At this point, I need to add some more elements to get a good sense of scale and because I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time modeling cars and people and everything else, I just went with some photos to add rubble, cars, building details and a highway sign. Next I started painting in some distance fog to push the buildings back and add more depth to the scene. I also painted lights in the windows, on the robot and in the street lights. From there I added smoke and dust and some glowing fx for fire and all the lights in the scene. Finally, I decided on a ninja to be the robot’s opponent so I painted him in with some debris falling off of the overpass ledge and added in some highlights, shadows and brightness adjustments over the entire image.

This is the final image that ended up on the site!  I hope you enjoyed the making of “Ninja Vs. Robot”. Stay tuned to see what we’re actually working on. :D

Chris