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.