I modeled this cool copper robot and cel shaded him. I’m pretty happy with the outcome, but I’m having trouble thinking of ways to detail him further. I was thinking of doing some bolts around the arms but other than that I’m not really sure.
Start animating. I think you may end up replacing the joints (fingers, knees, elbows, hips) with balls or something else that allows bending without distortion.
A suggestion is to add a couple more loops of white / orange and make one of the colors smaller. So it looks like the flexible neck of a desk lamp, or the hose that connects the shower nozzle to the wall. If you add that kind of thing at the front under the stripe below the chest it would look like abs.
Come back to small details after you make the adjustments needed to make animation look better. There is still lots to do if you want to animate. Like - the same loops at the elbows are needed on the shoulders.
Good luck.
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I’ve tried rigging it but I made the stupid mistake of using other meshes and joining them all, so weight painting and merging is a pain. But I can try ball joints if distortion is noticeable. Would i just remove the cylinders and add spheres, and position armature joints at the center of the spheres?
Yeah, thats the idea.
Look at mechanical rigging, not humanoid rigging.
Mechanical rigging is done without weight painting. A bone per body section. So it works well with your ‘stupid mistake’ of joining meshes.
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If you’ve just joined the objects, but not the vertices, go into edit mode, select all verts and then press ‘P’, to separate, and choose “by loose parts”.
With regards to improving the model, it depends on what style you want. You’ve gone cel shaded, so I guess you want to keep it simple, but I would suggest replacing the perfect cylinders with some more interesting shapes.
Imagine if this were a real robot; if it wanted to bend its arm, how would the perfect cylinder facilitate that? I think a good place to start would be the inside of the elbow and the back of the knees. make a U-shaped cut, so it makes sense that he could bend his arms and legs.
The same with his chest and pelvis. If he wanted to bend forward (if he can), his pelvis and or chest would cut into the abdomen area. Again, just making his pelvis into more of a wide V shape and cutting a U into the lower part of his chest, would allow him to bend forwards.
Looking at this Stormtrooper armour should give you some ideas. Even though it’s quite simple - almost just cylinders on the arms and legs, there are gaps and cuts in the armour to allow the joints to bend.
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Excellent example to use.
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Maybe use rivets instead of bolts… the same but with a smoother look…
I used a decal from the Decal Machine’s Examples. But you could make one up rather quickly as you were going to make a bolt anyway…
Great idea, thanks!
You’re welcome. And thanks for saying thanks!
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