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].