A City Doomed to Destruction

And its Arbiters of Demolition

Sean Finney

Jonah Gold

Mark Angelillo

with special guest star, Charles F. Kelemen

CS91 Spring 2002

the task at hand...

In the beginning, there was a project, and this project pitted young, hopeful animators against a task of great magnitude. Three young animators decided they should pool their efforts. They decided to create a city, and create two giant robot warriors to battle it out in the playground of their own making. The task was large. It required the young animators to pull on most everything they had learned about Maya, and even discover some new tricks. One created Bloxor, one created Mr. Roboto, and one created the city itself.

here's the movie

The City -- MA

Phase 1 -- Foundation

The city began as a polygon plane. The roads went on second, as did the sidewalks and intersections. The park is painted with a grass 3D paint texture.

Phase 2 -- Buildings

Each building has a separate maya scene file. I used polygons to make the buildings because they are less complicated than NURBS, and would allow the rendering to go much more smoothly.

The textures I used were mostly the "Granite" and "Rock" textures over a lambert surface. Occasionally, I got adventurous, there are some blinn "Marble" textures in there somewhere, on some of the more complex buildings. Some of the buildings have windows. I accomplished this by making polygon cubes with transparent blue colored blinn textures on them and unioning them to the building.

Always remember to discard the history before importing the building into another maya scene. It makes things go a lot more smoothly.

Phase 3 -- Vehicles

The vehicles are all also made from polygons, extruded and duplicated and scaled and played with as necessary. The text on some of the vehicles was created with planar surfaces. Windshields were done much the same way as with the buildings.

Phase 4 -- Extras

The tree trunks are rotated curves with wood textures. The leafy parts are sculpted polygons. -->

The fountain and the pools have planes that are partially transparent with water textures on them.

Check out the swingset. The kids need a place to play. -->

Phase 5 -- Destruction and Other Animation

I used a lot of blend shapes here. With a blend shape, one can easily key the motion between a standing building, and a destroyed building.

By keying various attributes of one of the buildings, I was able to make it turn red and then disappear.

The vehicles are all on path curves so they follow the roads smoothly and evenly.




Mr. I. Roboto - JG

History

"Mr. I. Roboto", AKA Servo Model BT3 Mark VII, was created as a giant-sized novelty Butlerbot for a national technology expo with the theme "Tomorrow's future... today!". Little did his creators realize just how true this dire prediction was. Mr. Roboto's ethical heuristics were accidentally altered by a semi-conscious coder at 6 A.M., creating a cuddly, streamlined cyborg of pure TERROR harboring insane agression towards the human race. Today, he happens upon a city with one thing on his mind: destruction. We shall see what happens next.

Model

Mr. Roboto is modeled out of NURBS surfaces,for a soft, friendly look in contrast to the badass-ness of bl0x0r. The different parts of his body were made mainly by revolution of curves and manipulation of primitives, except for the face, which is a surface of revolution sculpted with the sculpt surfaces tool. His eyes glow with two low-emission point light sources and the siren on his head is another point light source, set to flash on and off using a simple expression. The magnetic glow on his hand and the beam of his raygun are curves with brush-strokes attached to them. His mouth houses a deadly flame emitter, made as a particle emitter set to emit directional cloud-shaped particles.

Textures

Almost all of Mr. Roboto's shading consists of colored Blinn surfaces, to make him look extra slick and shiny. The eyes and siren are transparent, and the mouth has a fractal texture mapped onto it if you look real close. The fire particles have a yellow-red ramp, and the magnet and gun have paintbrushes attached to them.

Skeleton

Mr. Roboto is smooth bound to a skeleton. He has some "extra" joints which serve to hold his form in various places, such as the torso and head.There are IK handles on his arms, legs, feet, torso, and head. His claws can be manipulated by rotating the joints directly. He is probably less flexible a robot than the competition, but makes up for it in charm and good taste.

Animation

Mr. Roboto was animated entirely with keyframes and Maya's Trax editor. The Trax editor is the wave of the future.

As are robots.

Bl0x0r the Grouchy Robot -- SF

In the not too distant future, an unamed student at swarthmore college (oh, let's just call him johanius) left his junior final project unattended in the robot lab over the course of a winter break. By the time he returned, the project--a hybrid of the animation, robotics, AI, and compiler courses at swarthmore--had already evolved to the point that it had broken out of the lab and razed the entire college campus.

Bloxor then proceded to annihilate a large majority of other nearby small east coast liberal arts colleges, before finally meeting Mr. Roboto in the fine bustling urban center of Metropolot.

More about Bloxor:

The largest portion of Bloxor's geometry consists of modified cubes and NURBS spheres, both rigid (the polygons) and smooth (the NURBS) bound to an underlying skeleton. However, there are a couple areas of much greater complexity. The hands, for example, were originally a series of subdivisioun surfaces, and later converted to polygons to save time for unneeded detail. The left hand has a lazer claw grafted to it, and the right hand has the middle finger bound to a special joint for making a very important gesture essential to the animation.

Bloxor's Head and torso also offer some interesting geometry. The torso is a severly mangled cube, subdivided many times without regard for aesthetic pleasure. The head is also a polygon cube mangled in a similar fashion, with "brain" and "brain case" domes on top. You may notice two straight lines coming out of Bloxor's face. What might they be you ask?

...and another gratuitous shot with the lazer claw...

and in the case that the movie wasn't enough for you, here's the first test of both the lazer and a primitive walk cycle, as an mpeg movie. note that in later versions, Bloxor's brain dome lights up before he shoots his lazers :)