Today's picture is now up!

The link is: http://www.imagestation.com/picture/...9.jpg.orig.jpg

(Right click, copy shortcut, ctrl-v into address bar)

Thanks a lot.

-Steve

Great images!

Is that a 12 pass effect for motion blur? Did you use global illumination? Can't wait to see the whole animation.

-Brandon

Thanks for the comments
I'm sorry, but you kept me laughing for quite some time... If we did the 12-pass effect, we would be still rendering the first scene now... Thats just a "cheap" image motion blur effect (you can get it by changing settings in object properties). But you are right about global illumination - we rendered the scene with a lowered quality light-traced skylights. We were quite limited with the effects we could do, since we only had 2 machines to do the rendering... (originally we wanted global illumination, DOF, multi-pass motion blur... all the nice stuff... but we had only resources for illumination at the end.)

oh yeah,
i am the animation manager this year, and last year we had two
other seniors on the team. After the graduation i was the only one
who knew how to use the MAX. Cuz i had to make a team i recruited
7 ppl who didn't know anything too. I just told them to brainstorm for
the storyboard, but it didn't help much. I wanted to make use out of them
in next year's competition so i just told them to do the tutorials at home.
99% of this year's animation was all done by me.

Amazing! What realism you have in your animation!

How did your team make objects so realistic? Where there a lot of UVW mapping? Or was it purely just fiddling with the material editor?

For instance, did you map the hammer (with pictures from a real hammer) and then bump map it? And how did you do the textures on the red tool chest?

I have to say again, those screenshots are amazing! I can't wait to see your whole animation!

Most of the reason that it looks so realistic is that we made the textures ourselves from pictures we took with a high quality digital camera. In fact, a lot of the geometry that you see, like the tool chest, is really just a basic primative with a good texture mapped onto it.

Lev is the master at mapping, so I'll let him explain in more detail. But mainly, the secret to getting such realism is to map real life images onto things.

mmmm.... Mountain Moo.... i;d like to see those given away at competitions :)

Looks great! can't wait to see the whole thing. In one of the pictures i see boxes on their sides and on top of each other, and makes me assume movement of boxes. Did you guys use the synamics software (havok) or just hand do it? Or am i totally off and making a fool of my self :) When did you guys start working on this? And finally, what grades are you guys in?

Whoa, Thats alot of questions!
Yes, there was LOTS of UVW mapping, almost every object has a UVW modifier on it. Because of that, there wasnt much to do in material editor - most of the objects just have assigned diffuse and bump maps, and adjusted specular and glossiness values.
Steve explained it pretty well: for these two, we just took pictures of the real things in our shop, and then UVW-mapped it (with planar projection) on the simplified geometry. The toolchest is really just two chamfered boxes, with texture maps on each side. We wanted to have bump maps on the objects, but we had to leave them, because of artifacts created by Light Tracer+Bump Map combination.
We used reactor for one of the robot with boxes frames, but the pictures that are uploaded now just have hand animated objects. (We will upload the reactor-ed scene later)
We started on January 4th, right after Kickoff, although we had some storyboard brainstorming, and extensive facial modeling practice before that 10,11,12

Again, thanks for the comments!

The image for saturday has been uploaded!

Today we are posting a screen of a man we lovingly call "Dead Guy". No, he isn't really dead. We just call him that.

Our ImageStation album is here.

The actual image can be found here: http://www.imagestation.com/picture/...7.jpg.orig.jpg

Thanks for your comments, questions, and support!

-Steve

__________________

Remember: Right click, copy shortut, CTRL-V to your address bar!

that is amazing...

I think that mountain moo is hilarious, you know what would be really funny? Print out that cover for that can on a label with your team number on the back, slap it on a can of the soda and hand it out as your little team thing at the regionals.

Yay for Mountain Moo!
 

None of us are actually sure what Mountain Moo is made of, but to me it seems to be one of three things: carbonated milk, carbonated cow hide, or carbonated beef.

I'd show you some of the original drafts of Dead Guy's head but Lev would probably kill me. It took weeks, but as you can see, it was worth it.

At the moment, the trend seems to be photoshopping Mountain Moo in convenient locations. Look for it in a FIRST photograph near you!

hmm..... interesting idea Katy.

The story behind Mountain Moo:

One of the parents kept a fully stocked icebox of soda near the door at every meeting. The sodas cost $.50 each (a steal! - sodas in the machine down the hall cost $.60). Every single meeting I would shell out between 3 and 5 dollars just for Mountain Dew (unless I had no money in which case I just asked people to help pay for my addiction). So when we decided that we needed more things to put on the table in the hammering scene, I suggested Mountain Dew.

Due to copyright reasons we couldn't do the Dew, so we did the Moo.

Also, I don't think that Mayberry's right. Something so good could not have such disgusting ingredients.

*laughs* our team lived off the stuff too, how else do you redo the box stacker at 2AM? We had a microwave there making Top Raman, Easy-Mac and Mountain Dew the entire robotics food pyramid. We called it practice for college.

Another image had been uploaded to our ImageStation album!

The direct link for the screenshot is: http://www.imagestation.com/picture/...4.jpg.orig.jpg

Look at Steve's sig, if you have troubles viewing the picture.

My sig? I just have the link.

Oh right - I was supposed to put instructions in my sig...

Anyways I'll just give you my spiel:

Right click, copy shortcut, CTRL-V to your address bar, hit enter.