Polyfjord®

A Luxurious Robot

Added 2022-03-14 13:01:04 +0000 UTC

Hello! The latest video just went live, and I am very excited for two reasons:

Firstly, in this video I get to have full creative freedom (with some challenging creative constraints), and it was REALLY fun to create. I had an amazing time, so if this is a video format that you like, I'll be happy to do more of it!

Secondly, after over two years of trial and error, I have finally managed to find a reliable and manageable HDR workflow for my YouTube videos. That means that this video is in HLG HDR with more color data than usual! It should make your OLED smartphone brighter when playing the video! But don't worry if you use a regular display/monitor to watch the video on, the colors should still look correct in 8-bit. That is the magic of the HLG HDR format!

The robot is rigged in a similar way as in the walk cycle tutorial, but the legs consists of hard surface objects that doesn't bend. Instead, they are simply parented to the bones of the IK rig. I have used empty objects to control the legs, which is probably something one should try and use bones for instead (this would make it much easier to use the NLA editor for animation, for example).

The textures in the scene is from Poly Haven (CC0). Wood texture (link), Rusty metal texture (link), HDRI (link). The scene will render quite slowly with 2000 samples to make sure there aren't any noise in the diamond material.

The keyframes are a little bit of a mess, so feel free to delete the animation and try and give it your own style! It's really fun to try and create life with a four-legged-creature like this!

This project also contains the custom bokeh setup I am becoming a big fan of. A plane with a transparent hole creates a custom shape for the out-of-focus parts in the image. It also makes the scene darker, so under Render Properties -> Film -> Exposure is set to 5x higher than default (this setup it why the scene is so bright when not viewed through the camera).

You can download the project file here: Luxurious_Robot_v3.0.0.blend

Thanks for all the support!

- Asbjørn