Robotic Resurgence

Lighting + Animation

A robotic samurai emerges out of nowhere. His motives and goals unknown.

Although, one thing is certain... he is not to be messed with!

Having recently seen the anime "Demon Slayer" (2019), I was very much into the Japanese aesthetic. As it might be evident from some of my works, I have also always had a fondness for weapons of all kinds, especially non mechanical ones such as a sword, katana, mace, scythe etc. I wanted this project to be the amalgamation of these two interests. Initially I was going to use a samurai rig, however I decided to go with the robotic direction, such as a robotic samurai warrior. I was very hyped by the idea of it and felt it was quite unique. The robot would also add some rigidity to the performance and a layer of mechanical dominance. This was also perfect project for me to refine and practice clean clear sword movements.

Having downloaded a robot rig (1st image), I modeled samurai like armour around it to make it look more 'Japanese' and not just any robot.

Anew thing I learned during this project, was to create and animate a sword trail.

This was tougher to do than imagined, especially in an animated sequence and not in standalone scene.

The set was inspired from many reference photos with a focus on lighting with colors of red, orange and yellow being the focus.

I mainly made it very traditional and old fashioned, made mostly with wooden materials. This would be juxtaposed with the unknown robotic samurai and his katana.