The animation was made in Maya. I started learning Maya during the summer of 2003. I worked on a few other small 3D projects before working on Robot-O. I compiled some of these animation as well as some behind the scene footage of Robot-O into a 3 minute video:

Watch some test renders and practice animation for Robot-O and Julliette5472z (5mb)

I wrote the storyboard on September 11th. This draft was completed October 3rd.

I ran into quite a few problems, like these strange shadows in the water. I fixed it by turning shadows off on the water:

After all the action had been animated, I had to render it all. I only had 1 week left before it was due. Rendering the animation in highest quality was taking hours to do a few frames. So, I ended up taking out the shadows to make it faster. It averaged at about 100 frames per hour. The animation is about 6600 frames long (30 frames per second for almost 3 minutes 40 seconds). I ended up rendering it on multiple computers.

After I had all the footage rendered out, I imported it into After effects, and synced it with the music.

This first draft was a good learning experience. I learned about many aspects of pre-production, production and post-production. I was involved in concept development, storyboarding, time scheduling, 3D modeling and animation, lighting, rendering, editing, soundtrack creation, and video compression. Feel free to e-mail me by clicking on the link below: