Vendo Redesign

Initially when i created Vendo, i intended him to be have four large large which allwoed him to walk around in the scenes. However when looking at how large he was with these legs, he wouldnt really fit in well physically with any of the scenes due to how large the model would be. There were two potential options that i could take to deal with this. The first is to scale Vendo down so that he is much smaller. The second option was to redesign Vendo to fit much better within the scenes.  I decided to redisgn Vendo's lower half a i belive it was a more elegant approach.

One of the changes that was made to Vendo was the removal of the legs and the addition of jet thrusters which allows him to float. This would make much more sense opposed to just scaling teh model down. Another change was the change to Vendo's eyes. Initially Vendo had 3D modelled eyes which could be manipulated to show different emotions. This however was made of a high polygon count stretched sphere to make the eyes look smooth. This meant that there would be an increase in render time when teh scenes are rendered.



One of the solutions i could have done is to simplify the eyes so that there are less polygons. This however would make the eyes look more jagged and wouldnt look quite as nice in my opinon. What i decided to do instead was to use a 2D image plane and have a png image with different emotions on.


 

To do this i needed to do a technique called driven keying in Maya. This technique allows me to change the texture of a mesh or plane depedning on how i want it to look at a specific time. This would then allow me to keyframe these texture changes as an animaiton. To do this i followed the video below by youtube user Drew Hodges which shows you how to do this.