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.