Beginning of Pre-Production Work

Carrying on from the last post entry, this entry covers the beginnings of my pre-production work.

To start with I created a moodboard image that gives you a general idea of the kind of robot that I want to create.

As you can see i'm aiming for a chunky/blocky robot, as through finding these images the more realistic end of the robot spectrum in games reflect the real life blocky shapes of construction and military vehicles. Anything with rounded or smoothed shapes tend to be more fantastical and unrealistic, or are just not what i'm aiming for in the design.

 I want to make it pilotable by a human driver as well as an A.I., as I feel this will increase the customization aspect that i'm driving for in its design. Its also given an idea of what parts i'll need to consider and model, such as pistons, tank wheels, metal poles and more complex parts made up of multiple pieces such as an engine.

Additionally it gives you ideas of work pieces I want to try and develop during the art pipeline, such as a blue print sheet and a rendering system that shows a scanning of the inner parts.

After this the next step was to create lots of thumbnails!

I had fun doing the different variations on the design and shapes based off of research that I have look at alongside designing these thumbnails, from games such as Metal Gear Solid, Mechwarrior and Armoured Core. Although two legged isn't as realistic for a giant robot design I decided to explore it in order to gain ideas for further designs.

In particular I'm focusing on the four legged/wheeled designs, as they offer the best results for a realistic look.Tanks and construction vehicles such as diggers, extractors and the challenger II tank were particularly helpful for realistic reference.

So from these thumbnail designs I decided to create some basic 3D thumbnails to see how they would look within 3DS MAX.

Thumbnails 3, 1 and 7 in Max.

Thumbnails 11 and 17 in Max.

Thumbnails 19 and 22 in Max.

My reasoning for starting 3D models so soon is that I don't want to constrain my pre-production to just 2D. Modelling initial ideas in 3D allows me to see if their are any mistakes or if tweaking is needed in the design. For these models proper geometry and vert/edge placement at this point doesn't matter. Its mainly to give me an idea of the shapes, silhouette and how they could all be pieced together. Like this example shown below.

Whilst the bi-pedal robots have interesting designs, as I mentioned earlier  for the sake of realism and functionality i'm going to stick with the four legged/wheeled.tread look. However the torso work for the bi-pedal robots will still come in handy at the very least. 

For my next blog entry that includes pre-production work it will continue to focus on 3D Work and further conceptual work.

In the meantime the next blog entry will give you an idea of the research that I aim looking into alongside the artwork that I am producing.