"The Chess Player" final piece

Please enjoy my 6 weeks project, and I am welcome for any feedback and comments of this animation:

Project Rationale:

In this project, I need to produce an animation of at least 30 seconds that showed a self-defeating chess-playing robot. To fit the requirement, I have produced two robot arms with a robot body. I have used the skills of IK chains and the reaction manger in order to rig and animate my project.

In this animation, I was worrying at the beginning of the project, because I don’t how to play chess at all. Therefore, I went to Youtube and search some tutorial and I found a very short tutorial that taught me how to win the game. The pink player wins within 2 moves. I have used the character gestures to show their emotion, as I decided not to include a robot’s head. The story of this animation was the blue player was very confident to win the game, and being arrogant by having “come on” and “V” gestures. However, because the blue player was too confident and there is a chance for the pink player to win. At that moment the blue player realised, so he was unhappy about the result. While the pink player hasn’t finished the game, the blue player was very angry and punched the floor. As the arms are connect to the body, so when the arm has a big movement, it cause the chessboard jumped up and all the chess pieces are flying around in the air with the slow motion effect. The end the animation, the pink queen (that who beat the blue player) drops on the floor, rolling and hit “The End”.

I feel that I have learnt a variety of animation skills within this project. I found the most difficult skill to learn was the IK chain and reaction manager. I have experimented with these skills a lot in order to get the right movement. However, this is good, because I did learnt a lot during the failure experiments. In this project, I have learnt the modelling skills as well such as lathe modifier and attaching shapes to objects to make it looks like the one we want. I have understood the importance of lighting in order to give the realistic texture of the objects.

The problems that I have during this project, mainly was my Mac doesn’t support 3ds max properly. Therefore, when I animated the chess piece is hard to see what I got. And because I have using the virtual machine “parallels desktop” to run the programme, and there was a limitation of t ram. This causes me when I tried to render a single frame out, it doesn’t allow me to do. Other than that, I haven’t go any big problems on modelling and animating.

After finished this project, my confident of working in the advertising animation industry has built up, as I felt that I would gain more animation industry skills when I finished my second year. I believe that at the end of this course I will have professional skill and will be able to work in the industry. 

Rendering & Premiere editing

Animating...

Storyboard

After I watched the tutorial, here is my storyboard! So I can animate my animation...

Everything done... just need to animate!

I have modelled everything, and now I just need to animate my chess player. But the problem is I don't know how to play chess. Therefore I found a tutorial in youtube, and I will use this for the step of my chess game.

Chess pieces design

Final Ideas

This is my final idea of my robot chess player.  I have given the robot a body instead of just having the arms jumping around on the chessboard. Having the robot body, I found that it would make the animation more interesting. Inside the body, will have motherboard and some wires that made it looks like a robot.

The idea was combined from my initial ideas as you can see from the previous post. When I finalised my idea. I would like to have the robot head as well, as it can tell the audience from the facial expression that I was decided to give the robot a LED face. However, it will be hard to see the face, as I don’t want the camera only have one position from beginning to the end. Therefore, I decided to use the arms only and tell the story. 

Beginning to create my robot chess player...

Sketching ideas...

In my brief, it said I have to include at least 6 pages of A4 sketch designs etc... in my finial piece. Therefore, I have done some sketches for my ideas.

In order to make my work creative and unique. I decided to have a "robot chess player" instead of just having the arms. The sketches above show that I would like to have a half body of robot, and there is a chess hiding inside there body. However, the final idea was inspired by friend that my friend recommend that I create the robot as a box, and the arms will hide inside the box. The box will act like a robot, does everything by itself. The decision that I made was using my initial idea (the half body). Although I like the idea that chess and hands hide inside a box, I think my ideas will look more interesting.

So, at the beginning of the animation, I will spend sometime to show how the robot setting up the game, and how to be self- fulfilling. Like the Geri's Game one. The old man playing chess with himself (self-entertaining).  

Moodboards of Robot Chess Player Ideas

Mood board will give me inspiration of ideas in every project. And in this project, there are 3 main parts I have to concern about.

Chess:

Chessboard:

The robot and robot's hand:

IK?!

This week in my animation seminar, I had learnt how to rig a robot arm  by creating a controller, and using the animation functions in 3Ds max which are IK solver and reaction manager. The following video is what I had done and learnt from the seminar:

First animation seminar- making an orrey.

Yeah! I’m a second year student of Multimedia VE, and the news that I got from the introduction was we got 7 projects to do within this year. Although there are lots of works, I reckon this year will help me build up a lot of 3dmax skills.

In this year, we have 3 difference fields of VE (Animation, Visualisation and Virtual Environment). These fields will help us to choose which pathway we want to do in the future.

Today, I had my first seminar of animation. The first project that we have to do is to design, build and animate a model of a self- defeating chess playing machine. During the seminar, Andy gave us a practice to start with this project. The practice was we have to make an “orrey”. An orrey is an object that showing how the solar system works. This practice is to give us an experiment with hierarchies and how to connecting objects in animation works. This year, Andy decides to teach us the skills in a flash tutorial instead on paper. I found it was much better of understand how things work.

The following is my finished work of the orrey with some materials added: