The next step was to make the robot look powerful, so I looked at different pictures from the transformers movie and tried to come up with a cool and original idea. I studied photography for 2-3 years, so I tried to capture the perfect angle, and from it to move and set up the pose of the robot and everything else in the scene.

The scene setup I created was really simple, there is nothing fancy about it, also the materials and the lights are really simple as well. (Fig.12)


Since I was using Mental Ray to render the picture I used simple Photometric Light for the top light, and 2 spot lights for the Trabant.

For the car paint I used simple Arch & Design material and metal preset for the skeleton of the Trabant and the robot. I added car seats in the car and a steering wheel to make the picture more visually interesting, since I didn't need them in the beginning. Once the car was in the scene I could see that these were needed.

Many of you asked on the forums why the car paint is so simple. The answer is quite simple. If any of you have ever seen a Trabant it's a kind of plastic/paper looking car. It's an old german car which is little and cute, that's why making it look like an evil robot was my goal. Once I had set up my 3 cameras I viewed all them and choose a final image for rendering. (Fig.13)




For the render settings all I did was to change the final gather to medium and to set my sample rate to Mitchell and the sample rate to 1/16, nothing to fancy.

And here is the final Render: (Fig.14)


I didn't adjust it much in Photoshop, I usually go crazy with my post production but I wanted to show the cool quality of mental ray, even without any major post production. Sometimes the simple things are most beautiful. All I added was a little sharpness to the image in Photoshop.

I hope you've enjoyed this making of.