It wasn't going to be long for a blog about Game Art to mention robots. Our course has a mentoring program set up between the first and third years, named Gurus & Grasshoppers, and they set us the task to create a robot. This would not go towards our grade, it is completely optional but the reason I want to get into the industry is to design cool things like robots, so I wasn't going to pass this up.
The brief was about as open as it can get: Design and make a robot with 2000 tris and texture it with 2 512s, so I could have gone down any route possible. I knew straight away I didn't want to make the typical death-kill-kill robot, I've seen plenty of these. I wanted to create something like Wall-E or C3-P0, an assistant bot, built for making human life easier. I hit the web for research, throwing together a mood board of sorts of different robots.
Once I had a good amount of reference I began sketching, my very first attempt was far too human so I tried to push away from the i-robots and more towards the Wall-E type robots. As I went on they became much more industrial and eventually I thought "What if they were made of scrap?"
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| Rough sketches |
The 2 bottom right robots where my favourite, one made from junkyard scrap and another from car scrap. I picked the junk yard robot because I thought he could have more interesting silhouette and overall look. My idea was that this robot was foraging for scrap to stay alive, replacing parts that needed repair with whatever he could find. The spyglass is because he can't replace his own lens and he needs better vision over long distances. Next step was to finalize the design with some Photoshop.
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| Photoshop final - Using colour scares me :( |
To start my 3D modelling I had to draw up the reference sheets, this was a first time for actually drawing them as so far I've only used photographs. I learned they require a huge amount of effort to make sure everything is aligned properly and consistent, they also should require more detail than I included, as I was using guess work for parts of it. Lessons learned! After reading Valve's DOTA 2 Character Art Guide I concentrated a large number of my tris towards the head and torso, this did lead me to a tight budget for the lower parts but I think I managed well.
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| Robot - Unsmoothed and naked at 1,980 tris |
As this wasn't being graded I wanted to play around with the texturing, instead of using photographs I wanted to try and paint them, like Blizzard, Valve or many other developers do. I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into but I had a go. The hardest part for me was that the final outcome wouldn't be a flat canvas, I had to keep uploading the texture to get a feel for what was working and what wasn't. Looking back I could have increased the contrast on the finer details as they become almost invisible at a distance.
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| Both texture sheets side by side |
I kept the colour of the robot quite dull, keep most of the colours in the muddy brown/red area. The first idea for the plated arm was to have it blue, but this clashed way too much with everything so I chose the dull green. If I was up to the challenge I should have experimented with different colours when I was painting the final concept, this could have opened up some interesting colour options.
The final model sits at 1980 tris, with the textures coming to 1.5mb. Overall I am happy with the robot, if I had more texture budget I would have liked to have placed an alpha on him for the hanging wires like I had in my concept. Below is the final render but he's unfortunately stood in a Christ the Redeemer stance, I've also put in a Sketchfab 3D model viewer, hopefully it works fine and you should be able to fully explore the final robot.
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| Scrapbot just wants a hug |
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