Okay, so I’ve been messing around with computer graphics (CG) for a while, and I decided to try and recreate something from WWE. I’m not gonna lie, it was tougher than I thought it would be, but hey, that’s part of the fun, right?
Getting Started
First, I needed to figure out what exactly I wanted to do. A whole wrestling match? Way too ambitious for a first try. A single wrestler? Still pretty complicated. I finally settled on trying to recreate a wrestler’s entrance – just the first few seconds, like when they first appear on the stage.
I picked a wrestler – let’s just say he’s known for being “phenomenal”. I watched a bunch of his entrance videos, paying close attention to the lighting, the stage setup, and, of course, how he moves.
The Modeling Process
- Finding References: This was surprisingly hard. I needed good, clear images of the stage, the lighting rigs, and the wrestler himself from multiple angles. YouTube was my best friend here.
- Basic Shapes: I started with the stage. Just simple blocks, really. A rectangle for the ramp, another for the main stage, and some cylinders for the lighting supports. Nothing fancy.
- The Titantron: The big screen! That was another rectangle, but I needed to figure out how to get a video playing on it. Turns out, that’s a whole other can of worms.
Lighting and Textures
This is where things got tricky. Wrestling arenas have crazy lighting. Spotlights, moving lights, colored lights… it’s a mess. I spent a good chunk of time just placing lights and tweaking their intensity and color. It was a lot of trial and error.
For the textures, I kept it pretty simple. The stage floor was just a dark, slightly reflective material. The metal parts of the stage were, well, metal-looking. I didn’t go into super-detailed textures because I knew that would bog things down.
The Wrestler (Sort Of)
I’m not a character modeler, so I didn’t even attempt to create a realistic wrestler model. I used a very basic, low-poly human figure. The important thing was to get the pose and basic movement right.
Animating the Entrance
This was the most fun part, but also the most frustrating. I used keyframes to animate the wrestler’s walk, the camera movement, and the changes in lighting. It was slow going, and I had to redo a lot of things multiple times.
Rendering and… Disappointment?
Finally, I hit the render button. And… it looked okay. Not great, not terrible, just okay. The lighting was a bit off, the animation was a little jerky, and the whole thing felt kind of… empty.
Learning and Moving On
I spent hours, maybe even days to finish the whole simple scene.
Even though the final result wasn’t perfect, I learned a ton. I learned about staging, lighting, basic animation, and how much work goes into even a few seconds of CG. Would I do it again? Probably. Would I try something a little less ambitious next time? Definitely.
