Picture for header:
Back in 2011, there was this 2D/3D graphics contest among a small group of enthousiasts on a Dutch tech community forum. Nothing big - there were no prizes to win, it was all fo’ shits and giggles, the learning experience and possibly the honor of winning.
Theme of this particular contest was Robots. My entry was this render of a lean, mean smurf machine, modeled and rendered in 3DS Max:
It was quite a simple model without a full rig (instead individual parts were moved and rotated to the right location for this render from the initial T-pose I kept to during the modeling phase) and lacking time I slapped on some colours instead of actual materials.
After winning the contest (yay) other competitors encouraged me to make it dance a victory dance to which I half-jokingly replied “give me a year and it’ll dance”.
Fast forward to 2024. It’s february and gray and dreary outside and I have some time on my hands. I’m reminiscing the good old times where a small group of 2D/3D graphics enthousiasts would motivate eachother to “git better” with each competition. I find Robosmurf.3ds on my old hard drive and am a bit sad it never danced. I’m sure that if I only could get it in Blender, I could make it move knowing what I know now. A quick google session teaches me that 3DS Max can export objects to FBX which imports well in Blender. So why not give it a go? With great help of @marcatore here on Blenderartists (as I no longer have access to 3DS Max and online converters don’t get me anywhere) I get the file converted so it opens in Blender.
What follows is a thorough clean-up session (although the conversion is way more usable than I expected), turning tris into quads and removing excess sharp edges and such. New (procedural) materials are made and applied. Some smoothing, joining and a tiny bit of vertex dragging and that’s all for the modeling phase. Having no rigging and character animation experience beyond CGBoost’s Robotic Planet course, I decide to slap on a Rigify human rig and go from there, as this allows me to import Mixamo animations and transfer them to the rig with help of the free and awesome Expy Kit plugin.
Finally, RoboSmurf IS ALIVE! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
And finally, he learned to dance after all. It took 12.5 years but now it’s done.
There’s plenty of obvious flaws in this production. Materials could be better. Some parts clip in bad ways. Hydraulic pistons go haywire in the animations while behaving very well in the rigging phase and I can’t find out why (piston halves are parented to empties and damped track constraints pointing to the other half’s empty. Empties are then parented to vertices of the rigged mesh. This works well until the parent mesh is twisted by deform bones) But I’m calling it done, after all this time. Please let me know whether you like the rebooted RoboSmurf!