![[OLD SEMESTER] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice](https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2021/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stop-banner.png)
When I was a little girl, I grew fond of one animated Pixar movie called “WALL-E”. I loved it because it showed people that even robots can learn how to love, how to feel and express emotions for those around them and be more human than many humans on this earth.
I chose a 3D Graphic Project by Dong Liang called “Cambot”. Dong Liang created a touching story where a “Cambot, short for Camera Robot, is a type of robot that will go around and shoot photos under its owner’s command.” However, there was one abandoned Cambot, NO. 406, who encountered a glitch during its production and now doesn’t follow the commands of its owner and only wanders around taking pictures of things he finds interesting, attractive and fascinating. How cute is that? I admire this project because the creator didn’t just create a 3D image, no, he gave this image its own life by having a story behind it. This so-called glitch made this robot have its own personality, look for beautiful things in the world on its own – this glitch made NO. 406 be alive.
The first step in this project that Dong Liang has done was playing around with sketches of the robot to find the right design. Texturing of the image was done in Mari – 3D Texture Painting Software: “I exported a neutral-pose mesh for painting the generic maps such as dif, bmp, spc, and spc roughness, and then I also exported a posed mesh for the rain mask because I want the water trails to follow the gravity.” The rain in the image was done in Maya, a 3D computer graphics application, using the nParticle; for example, to create the rain streak, Dong Liang randomly instanced 5 different streak models to a nParticle system to generate random rain drops as if it was in real life. To set up the lighting, Dog Liand used aHDRI provided by sIBL which also gave him a good bokeh effect when turning on the lens blur. Lastly, “the rain streaks and splashes were rendered as separate pass and were comped into the beauty pass in Nuke.”
The creator’s artistic sensibilities played the biggest role in the final form because, as I’ve already mentioned before, Dong Liang made his work be alive by having a story about it, by giving his robot characteristics of a human being and also, by creating a short clip of NO. 406 which brought that 3D image to life in literal sense. This project radiates warmth, happiness and truth – you might have a glitch yet you’re unique and beautiful in its own way. Maybe having a glitch is an advantage? That’s something to think about.
