Robot: The Dwayne Johnson

Not going to lie, that pun was awful... Like seriously awful. However, what is not awful is the inflatable rock!

So last year, Oliver Freemantle, Ajay Chander and I created a piece of VFX involving a castle (you can see this on the portfolio page). For this project we carried out the process of photogrammetry in which a 3D model is generated from a turntable of images. In this case, we did that on multiple rocks which were never used in the final piece. So I recycled them for this project (not too bad as I took the pictures in the first place).

From here I exported the rock into Maya where it was retopologised, sealed (as it had a hole in the bottom) and had the texture projected back onto it. I then brought this into ZBrush to add a displacement map from the original model and add further detail. Finally, because the textures were a ridiculously low resolution for some reason, I brought the rock into Mari and painted some extra high res detail.

Then using the remap value technique I created other maps within Maya and whala! A rock!

Cheeky render test!

As this rock was to be an inflatable rock, I used blendshapes to create the effect of inflation. This was driven by a set driven key (what a surprise) which also controlled the strength of the displacement map.