It's all begun when I watched the new Energizer's TV commercial in television. They made the Energizer character in 3d and his movement and action looks very well done. After that I've decided to make my own 'battery' story and this time I wanted something that had to be really mine, the characters, story and environments.

I started with some concept drawings of the characters, enemies, guns, desert etc. I didn't want to make another Energizer imitation so I come out with my own designs for the characters and put some of 'The Matrix' style (bullet-time) in the animation. I also didn't want a long duration animation like Cybird (my first complete animation. click here for more info) but enough for 1 minute, full action, simple and I could finish it in a month. Soon after I had the ideas, I named this short animation project as 'The BatteriX' (battery + matrix)

early concept sketches of Zeo character

Storyboarding

I wanted to start design the storyline immediately. It begun with a simple story sketches and after that I made a few pages of storyboard for this project. I usually have very clear in my mind every action and camera movement, but creating storyboards has been very useful to check how many shots I needed to visualize and create the right action.

the storyboards

Modeling

Then I started modeling the Zeo character in 3d Studio Max. It is a quite simple character with cylinder for his body, sphere eyes, two hands and legs but some details with his five fingers. The 'agent' characters (enemies) actually is just a duplication from Zeo's model but with color changed to black, different shoes shape and eyes that has been replaced with black glasses. Most of the character parts mainly starting from primitives or extruded shapes and I tried to reduce the polygon count as low as possible. Finally only 4422 polygons for Zeo and 3842 polygons for agent.

Zeo & agent character in 3d Studio Max.

click on thumbnail to enlarge.

Special effects

Bullet trail

Probably the trickiest effect was the Matrix-like bullet trail. In the movie The Matrix, it looked to be a moving particle emitter that instanced disc-like objects which refract. Although what I've done in The BatteriX won't really have the same effect in The Matrix but it trained me enough to figuring out how I can accomplish the effect with the toolset that I had.

section of the bullet trail

Firstly what I did was build a cylinder, modify it and giving it a look of many discs lined up in a row. Then I make it transparent and put some reflection using the material editor in 3dsmax. The transparent and reflection amount was different in different scenes. I had to change it to make it look same from the previous scene because lights give a different reflection effect when you see it in a different camera angles. In animating the trail, I've duplicated the row of the cylinder to make it long enough to cover the entire path of the bullet, or at least long enough for the camera view.

the result in the animation

Particle fire

Actually at that time I'm not very familiar with 3dsmax's particle system. So what I did was created the same look of particle fire using a sphere gizmo that provided in atmospheric apparatus in helper section. I made about 7 to 9 of them and placed it randomly with different size, animate it to move upward and group it. After that I applied a 'fire effect' to the sphere gizmos and gave it a look of a fire by adjusting the color.

particle fire in wireframe and rendered view

In the animation there is actually just one particle fire sequence was created but I've duplicated and rotate it with timing adjustment to make it look different to each other. With that technique plus with fast movement and different sound make people won't notice the tricks behind it.

final result in the animation