Development of Robot arm.

My first plan of action was to find as many things to do with cybernetics in today's world and future/sci-fi.

From looking up this research I found images and placed them onto a moon board as shown below.

 It's very interesting to find out that some of these pictures are real and that modern science is able to create robotic arms for people by using electric pulses. By using electric pulses which the brain sends out to that area of the arm and the robotic arm picks up this signal and then moves the arm.

However some people can't adjust to this due to a psychological problem called ghost ligament syndrome, this means they believe it's their arm moving however their brain cant cope because they see it's a robotic argumentation their brain can't understand and sends the wrong signals are sent to the machine causing it to malfunction.

From this information it could be used in my Story Trailer.

Building the Arm

To start off I knew that I would be going for an arm because I can use the P.O.V angle on the camera to get a feel for having a robotic arm through the viewers eyes.

These are very basic designs which is want I want at present because the time era is now but  not futuristic so design has to good and not perfect as in Sci-Fi films.  Moving from right to left the first design was a very basic one to test with match mover, a 3D tracking software which I'll be using with the final product. My second test was made as a whole piece of geometry and it looks good however the rigging will need a lot of development because the model becomes unrealistic as it bends a lot. The final model is the one which I shall be using as it has been made with separate pieces, but parented together to make it more robotic and the rig works well as it uses the different parts of the model.


Building the Hand

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Using the same design idea on the hand I wanted to make it very simplistic because hands can be come complicated, also the individual geometry works because the rigg interacts better for the robot hand. Although I would do this on a human hand and use normal geometry it would look odd in this case because it's a robot hand, so using simplicity works nicely.

Tracking Hand and Arm.

Quick Practice with the 3D tracking Match Mover. I'm using a tutorial in this and also the animation studio in the background consequently the actor with the glass is the digital tutor. In this I started with a 2D plane and then changed to 3D afterwards because it was a rectangle. In my case it would be best for me to start in 3D then add the depth of field.

Starting with my hand to track.
In the picture I've added black marks to my fingers to place the tracking points in Match Mover

This worked well until the points were not readable by the tracking system because the overhead lights were reflecting the points. I therefore had to go to key framing for the tracking points to verify  their movement to see if they were correct.

 In Match Mover adding tracking data.

The next step after this process is to get the tracking data into Maya and use the tracking data with my model.

The screen above shows every tracking point recorded by my hand in the first 24 frames.

This was quite stressful because of the mirrored and the data was too complicated for me to isolate the information I needed. I continued working and followed my online guide.  

Thankfully this was very productive. Below is the arm with the influence of the tracking data (which is hidden)

 So now it was just a matter of piecing it all together

The background.

Adding the arm and removing the black background from it.