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H7 Robot Animation

10

RBGProd Studios from Switzerland have just finished a detailed animation for a Swiss French company (website) The animation relies a lot on camera footage, featuring an animated robot (named H7) who has been composed into the footage.

Oliver Amrein writes:

"The project was started last year as a storyboard and a 1st draft of the robot
(his name is H7) was shown to the customer in June.
We filmed the factory shots during the summer using HD cameras.

Last october, I participated in the Blender advanced classes in Amsterdam, this
is where i had valuable advices from both Bassam for rigging and Andy for
lightning/compo. It was like a mix of classes and workshop where you could work
on personal projects and get answers and help. I strongly recommend people to
take part on the next one :)

Plus as a bonus you get chances to meet great people, like blenderclassmate
Francesco Siddi, that we invited then to Switzerland to help on the last weeks
of full stress before the deadline.
"

Pablo Vasquez also helped the team out animating the H7 robot, optimizing files and giving plenty of tips on composting. We also have reports that he enjoyed the famous Swiss cheese fondue. :)

Some of the composting for the animation was done using Blender, but After Effects was used for the masking and rotoscoping of objects and people around the robot. The program used for the 3D match moving was Syntheyes and the transparency effect was done using a displacement plugin in After Effects. The video was finished in december 2008, but has only recently been released to the public for us all to enjoy.

(Click the image to go to the Youtube page!)

10 Comments

  1. Wow - those workers are really into what they're doing. They never noticed a big blurry blob right in their faces or feel tremors .. heck, he's flying around with a jet engine on his back through the warehouse and they don't look up!

    Overall pretty cool. Good concept. May have made it more fun and interesting if there was a bit more .. human interaction. For instance, when he's sneaking through the offices I fully expected to see one of the people turn around like "Wha?" or something. Reason being - right now the robot and the people feel like two completely different things - two different movies and makes it less lifelike. If you can marry the two and make it feel like they're meant to be together then you get more interest.

    Again, over all it's pretty slick I enjoyed watching it.

  2. Sorry for my bad english.

    Cool. But:

    _ it's too long and No Story!
    _ The robot could be better! The monitor head whit "desktop" is as pizza without mozzarella.
    _ the animations of robot could be better! Sometimes it appears into no gravity zone.
    _ the view of robots it's a (bad) copy of tiny robot on the film "Transformer".
    _ the photorealism could be better!
    _ It is my advice: blender rendering look !

    Anyway, cool!

  3. Nice work, but as a corporate video it's death. What the hell were they (Humard) thinking? It seems self-serving, like they just wanted to see a CGI 'bot looking around their facility at all the places that everyone who works there knows about and knows what those things are for, but you don't. I mean, what do they do at that place? The video didn't answer that for me.

  4. I think a lot of folks are missing the point of a video like this. The point of something like this would be to show off the facilities, workers, and to "sell" those, not necessarily the product.

    From the website:

    "The H7 robot which is the symbol of our company, will make you discover our philosophy of company. Come to view film."

    Having a big robot walking around and not being seen shows that the employees are so focused on quality and productivity that they can't be distracted. On the production floor when he transforms into the machine it shows a worker jumping into the seat and getting right to work.

    I think it was rather well done and congratulations to Oliver. Obviously the company agreed, as it's featured on their main page in the current events.

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