More Tommy updates

The lower legs and feet are done! I started on the chest-mounted gun as well, but no caps of that yet.

Updates [Tommy]

Today hopefully marks the first day of me getting properly back into the swing of things. Maya is working on the new computers, and I was able to get in this afternoon and do a few hours of work. The 'Ancient Aliens Megazord' files aren't opening on the new machines, and I hope to get that sorted tomorrow.
For today, I've made some progress on the Tommy. After some minor adjustment to the shoulders, the arms and hands are in place. The main work for today involved placing some basic blocks to get the size and proportions of the legs right, after which I focused on the pelvis, hips and thighs. I did possibly far too much work on the hip and thigh cylinders while they were at the odd angles you see above, before realising I should have done said work before putting them at their silly angles. Ah well.
Anyway, I'm happy with where those parts are at the moment. Jobs for tomorrow [aside from getting those Megazord files working] will be finishing the lower legs/feet/tank treads, doing the weapons [the larger handheld one and the smaller body-mounted machine gun], and putting rivets all over the damn thing. Probably a few more mechanical details here and there.
If all goes well, should be another update tomorrow. Stay tuned.

A Good Shellacking- Trurl

 The second of the two robot creators in the Cyberiad [the name for Lem's collection of short stories] is Trurl. Yes, these are actually super-intelligent robots who create other robots and devices. On the top left of the above page is a little doodle of how Trurl is shaped in the illustrations in the book; he's portrayed as shorter and stockier than his colleague/rival Klapacius. Immediately, I wanted a sort of rounded shape for him, in particular his head. I don't know why he's got something that looks like a lightswitch on his back, but I like it, so it stayed. He originally had very general robot-looking limbs with pincer hands, but these were changed for two reasons.
* After making his head retract, I wanted him to be able to fold up entirely,
* Trurl is supposed to be a skilled craftsman and scientist; having crude pincers for hands just wouldn't do. In one story, he synthesises gold from thin air by rearranging molecules with his bare hands. Such finesse would be very poorly represented by pincers.

 So that they did not go to waste, Trurl's original limbs were given to the 'Machine To Grant Your Every Wish'. In the story and animation, this machine presents itself to Klapacius under the guise of a gift from Trurl, claiming to be a machine that can supply anything he needs for his projects. In reality, Trurl is hiding inside it and supplying items, while hoping to spy on Klapacius' current project. This machine had to have a large, hollow body for Trurl to hide in, so I patterned it after a dustbin and one of those things they keep road salt in. This cemented the idea that Trurl should fold up into a compact form, so as to fit inside this thing easier.

Trurl's forearms and lower legs eventually became semicircular shapes, so that the limbs could fold into themselves and collapse into flat cylinders on the sides of his cuboid central body. During modelling and planning, I was forever shuffling about where exactly the limbs connected to his body so that they'd best fold flush.

 The almost-finished Trurl. At this point, save for a few adjustments, he was done. So that he'd stand out in Klapacius' brownish lab, I made him a bright, rust-like orange. Parts of him are also hollow, like Klapacuis, but that's so he can fit inside himself. As before, he was textured black all over, then visible faces were retextured, leaving interior parts and seams black.

 Trurl was made in a copy of Klapacuis' Maya file, so I always had the other robot nearby for scaling purposes. He was textured using the same texture files as Klapacius which were then palette-swapped, thus we have the Trurl-coloured Klapacius standing to the side. [Limited edition!]

 Much like his colleague, Trurl can strike poses. It was important to get the points of articulation for each of his limbs decided, so that each joint was modelled accurately and, by the same token, so that I didn't later move a joint in a way it wasn't supposed to move.

This is what this Trurl looks like collapsed down. After this, the semicircular parts of his limbs were increased in size to sit flush with his body, and the positions of his limbs adjusted one final time so that, as seen in the animation, he folds up properly.

A Good Shellacking- Klapacius

Of the two robot creators in the Lem stories, Klapacius is usually a bit taller. He didn't require any particular features to be built into him for the purposes of the animation, so I made him pretty humanoid so he can express stuff through body language and jazz like that. Later on, he wound up doing all kinds of things like folding his arms and resting his hands on his hips- somehow he turned out as a surprisingly sassy robot- but that bulky armour on his lower arms kept getting in the way of his sassiness. We live and we learn.

 This is a rough sketch of what the layout of his laboratory looks like. To be precise, it's the entryway part of his lab and a sort of study/workbench area. The shots from outside show that it's quite a large building, so I implied that there's more to the structure by making a staircase going down at the end of the hallway. Sadly, that didn't get shown much.

 

One more item to the list of tragedy is a feature I didn't eventually implement. The idea is that Klapaucius' head and upper torso are a seperate unit to the rest of his body, and it would be lowered down from a rig on the ceiling and lock into his body. That didn't get rigged up, but the details on Klapaucius' body on the final model that sort of look like a waistcoat are the big locking clamps and bolts left over from that idea.

 On a brighter note, here's the finished model, and I'm pretty satisfied with him overall. All his joints work, and every surface is properly textured. The way I worked with these models was to put a flat black texture over the entire thing, then add other textures seperately to the faces that were visible. That way, there's some black left in the insides of his limbs, in the seams between panels, etc.

 Here you can see a little bit of what I was talking about [you can see the black texture inside where his ankles and wrists are, and between panels on his body]. One thing that's a little hard to see in these screencaps [if you look carefully in the one below, you can sort of see it] is that Klapacius' forearms [and lower legs] are hollow- there's a thin cylinder that connects his elbow joint to his wrist, then a larger, hollow cylinder over that connected just to the elbow, which forms the armour you can see. If I use him for another animation, I'll have him store tools in there; he uses a couple of screwdriver-like items in this animation that would fit in there easily.

One thing that I particularly like about both Klapacius and Trurl is that I gave them both movable eyebrows/eyelids. Klapacius actually got upgraded a little from the pictures here, in that he gained lower eyelids [since I decided, when redoing the storyboard, that he needed to make an expression that required them].

New Designers

...was last week, amazing, and scary. Here's the cover of my portfolio from the event:

Very basic, but it was thrown together last-minute. As was half the portfolio, really. I very much regret that. Too much stuff going on at once, I say. The two robots on the left are from 'A Good Shellacking', the animation I made for my final project at uni. It was based on a short story by Polish robot-author Stanislaw Lem, and voiced by myself, my girlfriend and my housemate.

I dug up quite a lot of robot design to fill out this portfolio, and worked up some more along the way, so I'll be posting some of it here with notes. I'd almost forgotten about some of this older stuff, but now I've dug it out, I'll model a lot of it eventually.

More Megazord Modelling

Half a vimana shell. I learned a couple of new things to do in Maya during the process of making this.

The completed arms of the Megazord, featuring the fists from the previous post.

I did this version of the face but have since altered it. I'm working on getting it to render at the smoothness setting it's properly set to...

The three Zords that are modelled so far. I'll get some better shots of the other two soon. Everything works, though- the arms fold up inside the vimana just fine without any unintended clipping. The charoit's wheels and the megazord's neck are connected as a single piece by that axle I mentioned in an earlier post, so they'll all rise smoothly as one when I animate the combination.

MERRY FISTMAS EVERYONE

And to all a good knuckle.

I'm modelling the Ancient Aliens Megazord in Maya, and I thought I'd just use a post showcasing the fists because they turned out pretty good. They aren't rigged yet, though.

Operator- RBA-01 Tommy [part 2]

So, this is what happens when you design a mech off the top of your head for a WW1 setting, then redesign it three years later after actually doing the research this time.

The colours are a bit lighter than I'd like, but I blame that on the Promarkers. It'll get grubbier. This is the 'Male' variant, armed with a 6-pounder naval gun. I'm not 100% sure why, but the two main variations of the Mark 1 tank were designated 'male' and 'female' based on their armaments- 'male' tanks had a couple of those naval guns, while 'female' tanks got rid of those and replaced them with more machine guns. Operator has both male and female pilot characters, so if the comic ever restarts I might not use those designations in case it gets confusing... but then that comic never cared much for historical accuracy.

Operator- RBA-01 Tommy

This also requires a bit of backstory.
Back in [I think] 2009, when I still did webcomics fairly frequently, I started one called Operator, which was intended to be a story of piloted giant robots in a WW1 setting. The choice of setting was more or less because 'Nazi mecha' has been done an awful lot, so I wanted to do German mecha that weren't Nazis. Unfortunately, I pretty much just barrelled into this without doing a whole lot of research first- my only source on WW1 being what I remembered from old History classes, and my only source on mecha being Gurren Lagann.
[Another tangent- piloted robots can usually be classified as 'Super Robots', or superheroic machines that have outright superpowers and break the laws of physics, and 'Real Robots', which are presented as more grounded weapons of war. Gurren Lagann was the former, Operator really should have been the latter.]
So Operator was kind of crappy in some respects, but it did form the basis of a consistent chronology in my head, which we'll be dipping in and out of in this blog. Fun! One thing that remains the same is that, in this chronology, extraterrestrial machines crash-landed on Earth some time in 1900, which gave us the technological boost to make working, piloted robots, named Armours. Posession of the alien machines increased international tension and contributed to the start of WW1 in 1914 [or, as it's known in this timeline, NE0014, NE standing for New Era]. Germany came up with a machine that could be operated by a single pilot and easily mass-produced, which Britain promptly stole, adapted, and produced as the RBA-01, nicknamed the Tommy.

The first iteration of the Tommy was sketched out very briefly beforehand [I assume] and mostly designed on the page due to laziness. This crop from a panel is honestly one of the best images I can find of the things. The basic proportions were inspired by Space Marine dreadnaughts. They were very chunky, and kind of rounded. One idea I liked from this first version was that the Tommy's 'head' was actually just a big helmet over the pilot's own head. This comic was lousy for scale, though, so there wasn't really room for a person to sit in there like that, much less move their arms [the Tommies worked on motion-capture-esque controls].

A year or so after Operator, I went back and re-designed all the mecha. They all gained wheels or treads of some kind on their feet. The Tommies lost the thing with the head I mentioned above, and the pilot sat in a cockpit in the big round torso [accessed via that brown hatch in front of the head]. The limbs became more skeletal, the arms in particular being just metal rods with plates attached. The engine was placed in a backpack with an exhaust pipe. They got better-looking machine guns and shields. I was thinking about restarting the comic, but that didn't happen.

For this design, I decided I'd actually look at WW1 'Mark 1' tanks in more detail, and blend those with elements I liked from the previous designs. In the process of reading up on them I discovered one very essential detail;

Mark 1 tanks were absolute shitholes to be inside of.

The previous Tommy design had an exhaust pipe because I naively assumed something with an engine would have a way for the exhaust fumes to get out. Nope, not the Mark 1. The crew shared one big internal space with the engine. It was noisy, hard to see, and full of fumes from the engine and guns. From this, I decided to eliminate things that made the Tommy safe or comfortable. Gone is the exhaust pipe, the torso block's shrunk so the engine's right behind the pilot's back, the hilariously unsafe feature whereby the pilot's head sticks out the top covered only by a helmet's returned, and the whole thing's a lot more angular. Mark 1 tanks were all flat panels of boilerplate and big rivets, pretty far from the Tommy's previously rounded armour. The skeletal arms remain, and the feet now have treads. To top it off, they're armed with the Mark 1's actual weapons.

Misc Design Corner

A couple design updates and miscellaneous designs.
Okay, the Chariot has a central 'axle' inside the body, with the Megazord's neck piece attached to that. The hole either side that it fits through is shaped so it clicks into place at the top and at the bottom. The wheels don't really need to turn, so they could be stuck direcctly onto the axle; the shoulders of the Megazord could rotate freely on the pegs they attach to.

Lower on the page is a design for part of a potential train-combiner, specifically a shoulder/arm segment. The train carriage pulls apart in the middle somewhere. The part where it seperates realigns into a shoulder joint. Either the front half of that carriage becomes the rest of the arm, or another carriage combines onto it for the lower arm. The same thing would happen for the other shoulder, and both carriages would plug into the back of something using the same pegs they used to plug into their front halves, so the resulting combined form would have a couple of pylons sticking out of its back.

Ancient Aliens Megazord part four

Stuck this together fairly quickly to give an impression of what this monstrosity looks like overall.

Ancient Aliens Megazord, part three

Moving along to the two I did this morning! Onwards!

The cow's pretty simple. The only issue was getting the layering of it all right, and the relative sizes of the parts... actually, scratch that, it wasn't simple. In case it's not clear, the front legs are closer together than the back legs, and a lot of the underside of the cow is hollow space. To transform it into a leg, fold the head upwards, flip the ears down, fold the front legs back into the chest and the back legs forward so the hooves fit in the hollow shoulders, flip the tail forward, pull the connector bit outwards out of its rump, and rotate the bell backwards onto the heel. Originally the tail went underneath but that would have interfered with the connection point. I'm pleased I managed to find a practical use for the bell. I might have to work on drawing cow heads, though, it looks kind of dog-like. My original plan was to have this in yellow and the satellite in pink, but it looks good this way round. Speaking of which-

The satellite forgoes the Nasca line details, since it's a machine of unspeculative, mainstream science, but it still has some gold/bronze detailing so it fits visually. This one really is simple. Fold the front halves of the solar panels over onto the back halves, then flip the lot down. Pull the lower half of the front telescope down and back to form the heel, then rotate the upper half up to form the foot. From the front, the foot looks hollow, because even though the telescope itself splits, the lens on the front does not. If this were an actual telescope, you wouldn't want a seamline through the middle of the lens [and you'd need a dustcap to stop it getting damaged as the sole of the foot, but hey]. Again, if this were a toy, you'd want a single translucent plastic bit for the lens to make it look good.

Ancient Aliens Megazord, part two

Moving swiftly along, here's the first few Zords that I made last night in the grip of a stinky cold. The final images for all the individual machines and the combined robot will be digital, but these are basically the finished designs as far as I'm concerned.

Giorgio's flyer is actually the smallest since it only forms the head, but that's fine. Having the pin badge to work from helped a lot. The vehicle mode is mostly unchanged from the badge, save for the colour scheme and some parts being altered to accomodate hinges and the like. Sometime between the first doodles and this I had the brainwave of making the face be Akhenaten [also totally an alien, guys], so instead of the tail folding back it instead folds forward to become a Pharoh-beard. We know from Voltron that combining robots must have pouty lips, and Akhenaten's lips are very pouty indeed. The face would either fold out from underneath [there wouldn't be enough room in the flyer's body to hide the whole face, so it sort of hangs out the bottom] or, if this were a toy, probably peg on as a seperate piece. It's a cop-out, yeah, but the rest of this thing's okay at avoiding those.

From the smallest to [probably] the biggest, we move on to the black Chariot of the Gods. [Black Chariot Of The Gods would be an awesome name for a band.] The wheels were originally stuck up in the shoulder position, but now they slide up and down. To transform it, you slide the wheels up, pull the lower part down, slide the engines back towards the body along their rails, then fold the rails up out of the way and rotate the engines down. Pull the neck bit up out of the top and you're done. [I forgot to draw the rails on the coloured picture, whoops.] The bird-like designs are from the Nasca Lines, another thing that's come up in the show, and serve as a way of tying all the machines together. They could be removed easily, though. The back of the torso has a recess and four small sockets for a possible add-on- nothing's been designed, but that option's open.

Vimaauuughhhna.
It's essentially a big flying cone/pyramid, so that provides a handy place to store the arms. It just splits in half, the lower arms flip out, and you pull the fists out the forearms [or peg them on, if this is a cheap toy version]. Due to the fact that the two bits have to fit flush together, the 'pegs' for the shoulders will be on the wheels of the Chariot [above], and the holes will be on these.

Ancient Aliens Megazord; Designs

I can't remember precisely how this conclusion was reached, but at some point in the last month or so the idea came about that Giorgio A. Tsoukalous was the obvious lead of Ancient Aliens, and the other folks on the programme were the other Rangers to his Red Ranger.

 Or something like that. Anyway, we discussed who exactly the other four would be, decided what they'd be driving as Zords, and I ran with that and figured out what exactly these things would look like and how they'd transform and combine.

Giorgio's got a version of the 'Pre-columbian Flyer' from the first episode which is sold as a pin badge now, and it forms the head, naturally. David Childress forms the arms with a Vimana, a vehicle of the gods from Hindu myth that he, and Ancient Aliens, speculate was a type of alien spacecraft. Speaking of chariots of the gods, Erich von Daniken has precisely that- well, maybe not precisely, but it's a chariot-shaped spacecraft that forms the body of the robot. Due to an amusing one-off incident when she referred to a cattle farmer as an 'expert in nonhuman entities', Linda Howe gets to drive a giant robot cow that forms one of the legs, something which I'm sure I'll have to apologise profusely for should I ever meet her, but in my defence it is funny. Finally, we have Sara Seager reluctantly added to the team, who we have nicknamed 'Actual Science Lady' due to her not really supporting the ancient alien theories, but appearing on the show to discuss the actual proven science behind things. She forms one of the legs with a space telescope, since her Ph.D is in Astronomy.
That was a lot of preamble with little in the way of stuff to look at, so I'll move along and round of this post with the fun factoid that at least three of these people have been compared to Indiana Jones.