Hard surface ROBO
Kitbash assets
Most of the very fine and intricate details were implemented with the use of boolean substraction and kitbashing. The kitbash is a paid pre-made asset which speed up immensely the workflow.
Boolean operations
For the integration of the kitbash assets, many boolean operations have been used. It taught me to be very mindful of the order of my modifiers including mirror, subdivision, and bevel. It was a great way to easily create complex shapes that would take hours if I needed to model if from scratch.
Topology and optimization
Besides the kitbash, I modeled everything following a 2D blueprint. The hardest part about this project was to teach myself topology. Bad topology and boolean operations don’t mix well. Untill this point I though I knew how to model. I had to watch countless tutorials to learn about edge-poles, creasing, bevel weight, optimization of the model. It wasn’t easy but I feel much more confident about my modeling abilities for the future and that’s the main reason I started this project.
Materials
I liked the very simple white color pf the Robot when I was modeling it and I knew I would keep it this way for the most part. The rubbery material was chosen to contrast with hard and solid parts of the robot. The light green was there to underline the dark red effect of the inside parts. I wanted it to feel like there lava or radioactive energy inside of it.
Lights
As a background of 9 years of photography specialized in studio, I highly enjoyed this part.
During the conception phase I already knew I would find a way to highlight the glossy aspect of the surface as if it was a car. I liked the challenge brought by the mix of metal, glossy plastic and rubber parts of it.
For that I used the light linking feature of blender and experimented with gradients and custom shape light emitters.
Animation
I saw a lot of videos of wrist-watches with all the inside parts and I wanted to do something similar. I grouped the objects by panel and attached it to an empty. All I did after was to keyframe the empty. On interesting areas, I keyframed elements individually on top of the empty parenting.
The most challenging part was the animation of the cables because I didn’t want it get through the robot and give a glitchy feel. Because the Robot was going in all directions I had to animate individual points of the curves using hooks.
Video
I created a very simple storyboard just for to organize what I wanted to highlight and how. I knew that I wanted to have shots that would follow each other in a natural way so I create a camera movement before duplicating and positioning the camera where I wanted to highly features. Then I rendered in multi-cam mode. I rendered multiple clay shots to adjust timing before shaded images. I imported the images in lightroom for a quick touch-up before the editing.
Character animation
MODELING
For materials, I created a shader library with scratch maps for Eevee, making textures easily reusable across projects. I also built a library of shaders and models, streamlining future work.
It wasn’t always easy—some technical hurdles took time to solve—but seeing everything come together made it all worth it. This project was a deep dive into industry-level techniques, guided by insights from a professional with experience in major studios.
PIPELINE
I recently completed two short character animations, and having a solid pipeline made all the difference. From modeling to animation, every step was a challenge—but also a huge learning experience.
ANIMATION
In animation, I used drivers to automate movements, wiggle bones for organic secondary motion, and focused on anticipation and follow-through to make everything feel dynamic and natural.