Navigator Finals

Will be going away next week with new awesome work commitments so decided to tie this guy up before I go, then move onto some architectural pieces over the next couple of months ( been talking about it for ages to people and they seem very intrigued by what I have planned, so more Concrete x Tadao Ando x Tron spaces to be made. ), done some more different takes on grades/scenes etc.
Many thanks again to Ben Mauro for the inspiration on the inside working of his head, which in itself has inspired more ideas for the future, and calls also go out to all the peeps who created such an inspiring world full of stunning artwork for Halo 4, one of the USNC helmet designs inspired me to do this!
Oh ye, in other news, I now work for myself, Crytek were kind enough to approach me and ask me to work on a fantastic project they are putting together and give me the opportunity to start to establish myself on my own two feet, scary but I'm hoping it will lead to other things and life adventures in the future, I can't wait to get going with a lot of my close friends and colleagues again ( all be it from home ).Hope you like the Finals, 1080p links below each image.

High Res here

 High Res here

 High Res here

 ECU/Brain workings:

 High Res here

 High Res here

 High Res here

Thanks

Eye / Vision Prototype

TT Navsystems are the choice of vision and tracking hardware when configuring Navigators.
Lightweight, easy to configure and highly advance sensors can send thousands of images per second to the pilots ECU, unlocking what is known now as 'FlyVis' ( inherited from how flies actually see. ), essentially being able to adept to constant velocity changes, anticipating counter measures required for craft manoeuvrability especially in tight situations.
Cockpits are no longer a wash of dials and output displays, once the early eye prototypes were accepted weight was cut from everywhere legally possible in each craft, complimenting their already sleek / no fat designs.

Navigators, cont....

This week with the little time I've had, I've mainly focused on getting the facial parts of the head in place with shaders and so on.
New eyeball models were put together with slight changes to proportions of the iris etc to a level I felt looks slightly better than earlier versions I'd done. I've gone through in excess of 5 lighting rig set-ups to check shaders work correctly in both light and dark situations, they were fairly close but didn't pop as much in daylight, so a happy medium has been found, so they can also work well in less contrasty environments as seen here.
Put this render and post together today, was kinda happy with the look so thought I'd share. Some subtle overlays, dust on lens etc....
More ( hopefully finished bust ) next week...

Navigators

Something I'm working up for the Navigators ( pilots ) of the craft.

Navigators although reminiscent of humans are not. The sport in its early stages went through seasons of purely functional robotic pilots but it was found that audiences couldn't relate to this setup, the governing bodies of the sport made a descicion to insert synthetic humans as navigators for onlookers to relate to in an easier fashion. In doing so the rules changed, craft were no longer rigged with thousands of sensors and piloting software to tune, instead this is now all installed into the navigators ( the link between craft and engineers ).
Rules also stipulate that each navigator must have dual 'Black Boxes' installed, aiding in investigation of several catastrophic incidents.
As technology was ripped away from the craft themselves, hardware and software in navigators surpassed everyones expectations, once again the 'pilots' were the stars, although not human, some becoming household names and flagships for sponsors and advertsing.

All work in progress....

Getting back to VRAY.

I'm a bit of a VRAY whore to be honest, and have a tendency to kick of some renders mid way into a personal project, I'd put together a sl1200 that was suppose to be used in another piece and at the time the main focus of these renders was to get to grips with the camera, DOF, exposure and motion blur settings to see trade of between doing in the app or post.

At the time, the dude (T-800) using this equipment was to be playing with the turntables and naturally being the DJ wearing some cans, I knocked these together with open elements to them, similar the parts of the endoskeleton generally having lots of windows / cavities of detail.

ED 209

Robocop has to be one of my favourite movies of all time, I remember being what, like 10-11 when my friend sneaked this out of his dads room and we secretly watched it in the early hours due to the gore / age restrictions at the time. Not only did this movie educate me into the world of a corrupt future where police and men of power generally live on cocaine and prostitutes, it introduced me to what has to be one of the greatest Mechs cinema had seen up until that time.

Modelled at a time where our company was moving over from Maya to Max, I decided to get my teeth into this to get to grips with Max again having used Maya for four years.

Couldn't resist playing around in photoshop and generally having a stab at getting an old photo look out of one of the photos as so much of the reference I had were black and white photos of the model being made in real life.