Legs and assorted Akhenaten face WIPs

Yes, I did make sure that the cow and telescope wound up the same height when they're in their leg forms.

 The inside of Akhenaten's nostrils.

 This is the model as I'm using it for the Megazord.

 The half face under construction.

 The finished face, but smoothed.

Akhenaten's face at an earlier stage.

Ancien Aliens Megazord updates [left leg]

The telescope and the cow, between them, took less than a week's work to get to this stage. The telescope, though, still needs some alteration- I'm not yet happy with the mechanisms whereby the telescope end transforms into the foot. There need to be more moving parts to let those telescope bits believably get to where they need to go, and there needs to be a slot to let the heel fold out. Othwerwise, I think this is fine- it's a very basic shape, even more so than the cow.

Ancien Aliens Megazord updates [right leg]

Having mentioned earlier that I'm forgetful when it comes to documenting my work as I'm doing it, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I don't have work-in-progress shots of the two leg parts. That shouldn't be too much of an issue, though, because they're both pretty simple models.
The cow is pretty much exactly the same as the designs. It lacks the Nazca line detailing, which will be added to the final textures. The head follows the same design but has been tweaked to be more cow-shaped. Incidentally, more giant robots should use cows for legs. Cow heads are actually pretty good foot shapes, you know.

Ancient Aliens Megazord updates [head]

Once more, it's been a while since the last update, mainly because I keep working away at stuff but forget that I should really be taking screencaps and putting them on the blog.
Anyway, here's the pre-columbian flyer with Akhenaten's face and the transformation mechanisms installed. Akhenaten's face is easily the most complicated part in this entire project, and took me a fair while. I might use it for something other than this project, because I'm quite happy with it as a depiction of the guy's [pretty weird] face.
The only part of the model itself I'm not done with is the mechanism attaching the tail to the body. Since the tail has to come forward to form the chinpiece, its connection mechanism is potentially going to interfere with the head connecting to the body. I may have to attach it to the face instead.
The textures you see here probably won't be the final ones, as they're just default flat colours from Maya, but I wanted an indication of what the final colour scheme will look like.

Belated Tommy update

And here's what else I've been working on over the past month or so; the Tommy model's done, and for the moment has a basic flat texture on it to show broadly where all the colours will be, and so I can render a bit of moving image with it.
Man, moving image, I remember that. Link.
So it's all rigged up to my satisfaction. I still need to crack getting the tank treads on the feet to work, and make it chug a bit while moving.

Here's some more work-in-progress shots, so you can see more of the details.

The chest-mounted gun looked like it was going to be a bit fiddly, but it was mostly cylinders and extrusions thereof. I made it larger than needed and shrank it down to size. I had to extend the mounting part, as I'd misjudged the degree at which the Tommy's body sloped.

Much the same with the naval gun. The irritating part about this was the rectangular blast shield with the oval hole in it; I'm certain I figured out an easy way of doing archways back in first year which I could have applied here, but I completely forgot.

The rigging, and the rigging with colour.

Belated Akhenaten update

Okay, so I have made some grand improvements to the Akhenaten face for the Ancient Aliens megazord. Previously, the model looked like this;

Now, after working on it for a bit, we have this;

Needless to say, I'm a lot happier with it now. I'm going to have to detail-up the rest of the robot to make it look good with this face, but that's no bad thing.

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].