Robot Love...2

Hey all, welcome back!

From the time I have had spare from working (which isn't a lot) I have put a few extra things in to my robot/drone that I want to share. The last post I put up went over my concepts and some of the fleshing out of the main body. I also talked a bit about the importance of silhouette and the players need for quick recognition with enemy types. I will show you what I have done so far and talk you a bit through what I have done and thought about as I progressed. I apologize for the lack of stage by stage images, I just got cracking with it when I could and took images towards the completion of each stage.

Now I had the main body shape more or less figured I wanted to start putting in some of the main functional points of the drone. Modelling something like this you may find that if you don't account for functional parts you may accidentally start modelling things in areas areas of movement.

After playing about with the sketched gun concept in 3D I settled on a more organic approach using a scorpion stinger and also some references from a Anime called Zoids to create a gun with pop up guns. This was in a effort to reduce on the over all length of the gun as I intended the gun to be picked up by the tail. It would need to slip out of its mounted position pretty easily so that design decision would help that. Here are a few images of the modeled gun.

I also had to look at the gun from all angles so I could make sure I would know that the players recognition with it would definitely be an aggressive weapon and it would be time to take cover.

The next major moving part will be the legs. Legs for mechanical characters can be created in many ways as they don't have to conform to the ideals of organic structures. They can extend and spin in 360 degrees if the designer so intends. In my drone I needed the legs to fold up neatly to accommodate a flying model of a sort of manta ray like shape but also retain enough mobility to create believable walking movement. I pulled some more references to aid me deisgn how the legs would work from spiders, Final Fantasy 8's spider drone (http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb57887/finalfantasy/images/c/c3/FF8_X-ATM092.png) , Gundam (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE095vYEJzwJH7tv-ZpruEZOTuUTgBvjewQvNCw01W8nQVM_8BXbaMot2-ch4BJFuwVfjE-7ec2yaWBjJL8b0EAUp10zv-dgvJ-pSDi4ZLtSwo_bD3Fht-zU2EPphDymgCtfnfOnareO95/s1600/5.jpg) and from Zoids as a solid starting point.When got into modelling the legs I did so in their extreme positions so make sure that at all extents sat nicely with each other and didn't cut.


Once happy with the shape and design structure I had created I did a quick Hierarchy Rig on the legs and played with them to see if the design was lending as much movement as I wanted.


I then attached the leg plating onto the mechanics followed by attaching the whole legs onto the model itself. Its pretty important to keep things simple until you have the main moving parts in. Adding extras to bolster the characteristics before this will only ever lead to problems further in to the modelling process.


This is all I have at this point but keep checking back for more at later dates and I may have posted more. Thanks all and feel free to comment or leave constructive feedback. I am also free if people have queries or proposals for tutorials they would like as well. Cheers =D.