Project Plan Revision and Pre-Production Work 5

Its been a while since my last post and unfortunately I don't feel iIve done enough work between the weeks gone by. Work for other modules and deadlines has taken up my time, so I have had to give serious thought to my my current project plan and what work is achievable in the time remaining for this project.

To this end I have made a revised version of my project plan. Luckily this still allows me enough time in that the second half of workload after Christmas won't be affected.

However, I've also made the decision to not make the robotic mechs totally realistic. What I mean by this is that I'm not going to learn all the ins and outs of say the engineering and scientific side of making these robots realistic, but instead stick to the aesthetic side of it, but also stick to the basic principles of making them work e.g. degrees of freedom, height considerations to real life vehicles, etc. But the main focus of the project will still be there, so the project deliverable won't change, which i'm happy to be sticking too.

Work that I've manged to complete includes further concept art for mech different parts, which include the head and torso parts.

For the head I made several iteration designs and  picked out 4 of the ones I liked to attempt to combine together. The first head looked too much like a gun and I immediately abandoned that concept. Instead, since the company building these robots is named RHINO, I decided to create one based off of the animal as well. I didn't want to go for a generic anime type head, so felt that these designs were more unique to my project.

The shapes were largely influenced by construction vehicle shapes, as I feel their shapes worked better for the design I was going for. Again like I did with the arms areas that can rotate or move in red, helping me to separate the armour parts from the inner workings.

With this done I selected the 3 heads I wanted to take further and drew them out with iterations, varying the looks of the armour, movable parts and inner workings.

I haven't yet to decide which head i'm going to use, but i'm happy with the selection I've created.

For the torso's I looked at the ones created for the side view concepts, and redrew some of them in a 3D perspective for both themes, and created a few extras for variety. I'm aiming for a fairly chunky design to reflect real vehicle designs

Again I haven't decide on the final pieces as of yet. This will be done once I've done iteration work for all the parts, so once the legs are finished I will form up the final design, essentially kitbashing it together as I did with the basic 3D models.

A point that I would like to highlight is that I will be properly exploring the technical parts needed when the proper modelling stage. I'll still aim to cover this in the 2D stage, however I feel that spending too muh time on the small details now will have a huge negative effect at the later stages, so the conceptual stage is more for a rough basis.

Lastly, on the research stage, I have found the website Pinterest to be incredibly useful for gathering an image database. Its a site that allows you to floor and create boards, where you 'pin' images that you've found from websites or uploaded yourself. So in order to aid my project I have put up images artistic reference images of robots from various artists around the web, both to aid my current project but to also help  me for future projects that I do.

On reflection, i'm still gathering the ground work out my designs. Whilst I have fallen behind schedule, I aim to make a come back and finish all concept art before new year. So for the next post, further conceptual work will follow.