This specific high-level course was designed to evolve your workflows, and give you some ideas to keep in mind as you go through the process of building the robot portion of your transforming robot. The objectives for this fast-pace course include looking at several issues to be dealt with when creating the transforming robot. We'll look at ways to use ZBrush and TopoGun in our workflow to build the fitted pieces and panels of the robot. In addition to modeling techniques, we'll talk about UV layout concepts, creating a proxy, and working cooperatively with other artists, including those working in other applications. It is recommended that you have some experience using Maya, ZBrush, and TopoGun, as we cover a lot of information in a shorter span of time. We won't be going through the modeling of the robot step-by-step, so if you’re a new artist, the Beginner's Guides and Introduction courses are perfect places to start getting up to speed. From there you can check out any of the intermediate step-by-step project based courses and they will give you the tools you need to complete the model.

This specific high-level course was designed to evolve your workflows and give you an in-depth look at creating a complete match move from scratch in NUKEX. The objectives for this fast-pace, intensive course include creating a 3D camera and scene to pass off to the 3D department and create a better piece of footage to give to the final compositors. By the end of this training, you'll have the ability to track your own shots in NUKEX and solve many common match moving and plate cleanup problems. Before we start, I recommend you have experience using NUKE and Maya. We will be moving at a quick pace, so if you're an artist not used to either of these applications, we have many courses to get you started and improve your skillset.

In Volume 9 of this 'Transforming Robot Production Pipeline' series, we will discuss the techniques that were used and some of the issues that were encountered during the lighting and rendering of this transforming robot project. We will look at how we went about matching the lighting between our CG and live-action elements, setting up our materials and textures, and rendering all of the passes and other information that our compositing artists will be using during Volume 10 of this series.

This specific high-level course was designed to evolve your workflows, and give you some concepts to keep in mind as you go through the process of building the vehicle portion of your transforming robot. We'll look at a few modeling techniques to make the model more realistic, UV layout concepts, and cutting up the model in preparation for its transformation. Before we start, I recommend you have experience using Maya as we cover a lot of information in a shorter span of time. We won't be going through the modeling of this truck step-by-step, so if you’re an artist new to Maya or to modeling, the Beginner's Guides and Introduction courses are perfect places to start getting up to speed. From there you can check out any of the intermediate step-by-step project based courses, automotive courses especially, and they will take you through the entire process and give you the tools you need to complete the model.

We will begin this tutorial by importing and formatting our render passes from Maya. From there we will do some basic compositing. We will then begin troubleshooting our shot and using a variety of tools and techniques to integrate our elements. We will also learn how to fix issues in our background plate using masks, keyers and other nodes. During this shot, we will be animating various elements to tell the story of the director. Finally, we will complete the NUKE tutorial by using distortion and blurs to create an ending for our infiltrator shot.

In this portion of the Infiltrator project we'll use the reference art created in the previous section to construct the character geometry. We'll take the design we've settled on and build it up in Maya using a variety of modeling tools. We'll start out by creating a large library of mechanical pieces that we can use to add detail and fill in open areas at our discretion. Then we'll build the large shell pieces and begin to put it together using our geometry library. We'll also talk about naming and grouping geometry appropriately and reusing geometry to save time. Once done, we'll have the geometry for our Infiltrator robot that we can then rig, animate and integrate into our video.

We'll get started by learning how we can quickly generate several rough ideas for our character concept using simple silhouettes. From there, we'll choose our favorite silhouette and begin drawing the rough line work of our character. Once we've finished, we'll begin refining and cleaning up the line work to prepare it for color. Next, we'll learn one method of painting color values onto our character and blending them to create the illusion of a 3 dimensional image. Finally, we'll walk through the storyboarding of a short animated sequence for our character. After completing this course, you will have a good idea of how to create and develop a character for animation. You'll also understand how to go about storyboarding out an animated sequence for a character.

We'll begin this project by examining the footage and seeing what processes have been already done. From there, we will enter camera data from the shoot and manually track the shot. Once we have a solid camera solve using manual tracking, we will use the automatic tracker to create many 3D points for us. Then we'll finish the match move by manually tracking key areas and creating a coordinate system. Once we move to Maya, we'll create some stand-in geometry and render a preview of the match move. This series of lessons will show how to use MatchMover's powerful manual tracking features to solve a difficult shot and finish prepping the file before handing it off to the next person in the pipeline. This will allow us to animate on top of geometry that is very close to the real world for increased realism and ease of use. All footage that needs 3D integration will need to be match moved, so this is a very important part of the production pipeline.

We'll construct the control rig with a production focus. In the end, we will not only have worked with the rigging tools in Maya, but we'll also have looked into ways we can use some of those tools creatively to get the job done right and at a faster pace.

We'll animate the Infiltrator with a production focus, using storyboards and an animatic to assist us in making sure our animation adheres to specific instructions. We'll get into character development and learn how to go about creating performances that are convincing and, at the same time, entertaining. We'll even do a little rigging and learn how to work with Maya's robust and very efficient Referencing system to update the control rig and, in turn, automatically have those changes update in our animation file saving us plenty of time.

We will begin by learning how we can optimize our high-resolution geometry to use our system memory more effectively. This will allow for more efficient, stable rendering, especially if you are working on a 32-bit system with limited resources. From there, we will take some time to set up materials for the various portions of our 'Infiltrator' spider and then we will begin the lighting setup. We will use an image-based-lighting approach to achieve a high level of realism and to ensure that the lighting on the CG spider matches the live-action plate. Finally, we will learn how to use Render Passes and Render Layers to output our final renders in a way that will give us a tremendous amount of control over the final result whenever we get into our final compositing phase.

We'll begin this project by importing our render passes from Maya. From there we will do some basic compositing. We'll then begin troubleshooting our shot and using a variety of tools and techniques to integrate our elements. We'll also learn how to fix issues in our background plate using masks, keyers and other tools. During this shot, we will be animating various elements to tell the director's story. Finally, we'll finish the shot by using warping and filtering tools to create an ending for our 'Infiltrator' shot.