TRAINSFORMER
SYNOPSIS
Meteors rip through the desert sky, slamming into the planet and leaving a trail of smoke throughout the barren planet. When the smoke clears, something moves, alien dogs, four-legged and jagged. The cyber-organic beasts come crawling out of the ravine as a pack.
Far off, a train barrels down the tracks. The rails stretch endlessly across the wasteland, cutting through mountains and ravines. The train’s headed straight for the impact site.
The creatures climb down into a canyon. The train follows, steam hissing, gears grinding. Then, in the dust and echoes, it shifts, iron and steel twisting, plates locking, becoming something more.
The aliens swarm, the hero stands ready. In the heart of the planet, they clash in one final fight, no way out but through.
ASSIGNMENT
Trains. Anything trains. In small groups, or even solo, make a short animation to showcase a train in an environment.
This assignment in past years has always been centered around modeling trains and environments. However, we thought that it'd be fun to switch it up and play with worldbuilding and try to push the limits of our abilities and teamwork.
ROLES
This was a sophomore 4-person project created by Matthew Leung (Me), Vinh Vo, Hyelim Chung, and Wenqi Zhu. We all tried to have the same amount of creative input and created the story together. Not only that, but we all tried to hop around and help each other with the different stages of the pipeline, so there were no really any concrete roles. It would be too much to explain what everyone did so I'll just list what I was responsible for. I was responsible for a part of character design, solely responsible for creating the Alien Dog, some Animation, some Modeling, and Lookdev/Rendering in Unreal Engine.
ALIEN DOG DESIGN
This concept was created by Me, Wenqi Zhu, and Hyelim Chung.
Creating this concept was a group effort and the process was actually very interesting. Wenqi (Left Image) and I (Right Image) made sketches of what we wanted for this alien creature. Then, using Google Slides, we cropped out different pieces of each other's drawings and of other references and bootstrapped our final concept, which was then further cleaned up by Hyelim. Our other characters were also made this way, which I think is quite fun.
Final Design
TRAINSFORMER DESIGN
Final Design
This concept was created by Me, Wenqi Zhu, and Vinh Vo.
We also created this concept the same way as the alien dog. We combined mine (far left), with Vinh's (Middle), and Wenqi's (far right), along with other references to create the final version which was then redrawn by Wenqi.
"BOUNTY BOARD"
Because there were so many mechanical parts and it would be outrageous for one person to model everything, we decided to put together a list of around 30 mechanical parts from trains, cars, or even random cool-looking parts to model, which we called the "Bounty Board". That way, when modeling the train or trainsformer, we could just use a bunch of these parts to make it look much more intricate. We aimed to each model 2 parts a week in order to keep us in schedule.
STORYBOARD
(Some parts that I modeled)
