Category: 4.1 Project 1 (Nick – Mechanical Arm)

During week nine, I began producing the mechanical arm animation. I used pre-existing green-screen footage provided by Nick as a reference to set keyframes for my own mechanical arm animation. Once the animation was complete, I composited it with the background footage in After Effects and exported the final animation.

This process required careful attention to detail and precision, as the mechanical arm had to be seamlessly integrated with the background footage to create a convincing final product.

In week eight, I created a skeleton rigging on the textured mechanical arm. To facilitate future animation production, I opted not to use hierarchy and clusters for rigging, but instead used a more complex skeleton rigging with blend shapes to drive the mechanical arm.

In week seven, I completed the full model creation of my mechanical arm, adding many internal components, some of which are hidden within the forearm and upper arm. This increased the complexity and intricacy of the mechanical arm model.

Additionally, I created material textures for my mechanical arm, using the aiStandardSurface material in Arnold. I found it suitable to use metal as the primary material for the arm, and while adjusting the material values, I increased the roughness of the material to tone down its reflectiveness, giving it a more fitting appearance and feel. And the overall color scheme is blue, which is a color that I enjoy.

During this week, I added more detailed components to my mechanical arm, completing the forearm and upper arm sections. For the upper arm, I created mechanical joint connectors and a blocking tool to add more interest to the arm movements.

Additionally, I improved the binding of the hand joints, allowing for more freedom of movement in the wrist, which will be helpful in my future animations.

This week, I added more details to models of a hydraulics system and an arm. Using the set driven key function, some

simple rigs were constructed on the model’s basis for a simple animation rig of the finger.

On the below video, here are some of the rigging tests: