I have seen a lot of beautiful models out there of mech soldiers and robots and cyborg-like creatures. I sit here wondering “How do they do it?” I know it’s mostly practice and experimentation, but are there any general tips on this subject that I should know?
Thanks.
I haven’t tried it myself… wait… I built Wall-e… Anyways the way I did it was to break down the robot into several separate parts. You don’t really want it to be one whole mesh but many separate ones. Easier to teak things that way.
Like say model the arms separately and you might even wan to have all the details as a different mesh too. Like if there are wires or panels on the arm have that a different mesh, keeps it simple.
Most of all just don’t egt ahead of yourself. Go slow and think about what you need to do and how you need to do it before you try. Saves time. Good luck!
Thanks, and I can’t wait to see Wall-E with textures and everything. The movie looks great, judging by the previews. Pixar always does good work.
Cheers.
I’m working on a robot currently, you can find it under “Ninja Robot” in the WIP forum. I’m modeling a fairly complex robot, with a lot of movement available, and also trying to make it realistically possible ie, not having a simple ball joint for the shoulders.
My process is as such, I work out how all my joints are going to work, and where I need joints for certain movement. Then I think about how the joints work, is the rotation driven by a piston or a motor? Motors are more flexible and work well for smaller joints like in the hands, pistons are a lot more heavy duty. Thus I work out the mechanics of the thing. Then I get out my sketchpad and start doing some concept sketching, I want to get a good concept of everything before I start modeling, and to work on the design and how it looks.
Next is modeling, I model all the parts individually, this will make rigging simpler, as I can just parent an object to a bone, and not having to worry about vertex groups and weight painting is good since this is going to be a fairly complex mechanical rig, with lots of bones being driven by posing bones. Particular details such as wires will also take alot of bones to rig up, and I have to make sure it will be automatically driven by the rig, because manually posing wires while animating doesn’t sound too fun. Simple smooth wires are easier than striped ones, and can be made and deformed using a nurbs circle extruded by a curve, and the points in the curve are hooked to empties that are controled by the armature.
Modeling all the mechanical parts isn’t that difficult, I use the cursor a lot while modeling to align things and rotate things. I also use the spin tool a lot. I’m using mostly subds because they are lighter on the polycount and my computer is a macbook so it isn’t maxed out with graphical power. However I can render with much detail. For sharp edges, I just use shift+e to crease the edges, and then I use smooth and edgesplit modifiers to make the parts look good. It helps to get your porportions and overall shape blocked out before modeling the details, as with customized, detailed parts, it’s difficult to change them later on.
Basically there’s no real secret to mecha modeling. Look at a lot of pictures of robots for inspiration, work out the mechanics and the design on paper before modeling, and model each part seperately. Build lots of details, and it will instantly make you model look much more realistic and cool, although sometimes simple forms can look really cool. What good is a robot though if it doesn’t look cool. Hah. Anyways, my 2 cents.
How do you split a mesh into 2 different mesh? I ask because i accidentally made a mech all in the same object space ; ;
fyrewyre,
In edit mode, select the verts you want to separate, then press p.
Best of Luck!
Thank you VERY much. Now i can move on to learning how to rig again 