Transform v.01

Me and Joe O'Connor are gonna be making a film together this year which, so far, revolves around a VFX fight scene. The story and what-not isn't there yet but we've been throwing some ideas out there and one of mine was to have like an Iron Man-esque sequence where the CG character builds around the Live Action character.

Here's a video from the Iron Man film (can't remember which one!) to help demonstrate what I mean:



This sequence is brain-frying-ly difficult to work out exactly how they do it, but from my 2 years in uni, I have some ideas of how it's done
I've been experimenting with my Elephant character from last year's project and trying to make him build together to form the full model
I basically broke the model up into many many pieces and animated them to look as if they are building together to form the Elephant ... before breaking it up I took off the Mesh Smooth modifier and then put it back on once the piece was broken, and I think, as a result, you can clearly see all the separate pieces! (which does not look nice!) ... once the pieces finished forming the Elephant I replaced the pieces with the fully formed, animatable model, so you can see a jump from pieces to smooth so it looks really weird!
It looks pretty cool so far and I really like the idea but the pieces are an eye sore at the moment and looks pretty cheap ... so this is a Work In Progress!
Still more work to do with getting the sequence right, but for now, here's what I've been working on:

Transform v.01 from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

p.s. Fail of my Life! just realised at the end of the video you see the "pieces" Elephant in the corner of the screen! ... oh well, it is a WIP :)