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.

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.