[WIP] - Robot Triceratops
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Hello!
I'm currently undertaking a project at Staffordshire University as part of my final year on their games design course and I would greatly appreciate any feedback on my work so far. I'm after critique and lots of it, no matter how negative it may be as long as it does help me improve my work.
I'm sure many of you have noticed a trend in dinosaur related threads over the past few weeks. My choice was a Triceratops.
The project is to create a robot dinosaur. That includes research, high poly, low poly, texturing and animating of a robot dinosaur for use within UDK. The final low poly dinosaur is allowed to be anywhere up to 12,000 triangles although I'm aiming for around 8,000 or above. Any textures used must be below 2048x2048.
So, here is where I began. I started by looking at the general shape of the triceratops as well as its dimensions and movement. I gathered from research into the way it moved that it would be a slow and heavy dinosaur as a BBC video showed how difficult it would be for it to charge.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Triceratops#p00cjgyw
I then began research into robot dinosaurs and how they're created. I found artists such as Andrew Chase and John Lopez that crafted dinosaur sculptures out of metal. I also looked at "Robosarus" - a 40-feet tall robot created by Doug Malewicki and Roboraptor as some form of contrast.
From looking at what the triceratops is made up of, I decided it would be interesting to see it within a form of slow moving 'Earth mover' scenario. The inspiration came as a mixture of the Trojan and the Marauder. So, I began looking at construction vehicles and tried to implement their function over form designs.
I came up with a sketch of how a triceratops might look if it was, for what ever reason, militarised and used as an earth mover.
My designs for the legs came under criticism for reducing the available movement of the robot. I tried to amend this by creating multiple redesigns of how the legs could be coupled to the body and offer increased movement. I looked at several robots from some fairly recent games to help create a believable mechanical design to have the legs move correctly.
I modelled the robot in sections going; head, body, legs, underside, rear and finally small bits.
A few areas were critiqued by my peers as in need of improvement. This included a few smoothing errors and a few obvious design inaccuracies.
A few additional areas were critiqued such as the legs looking unable to bear the heavy mass of the body and a few blank areas that could do with some content. I tried to improve on this by increasing the width of several hydraulic pipes, adding armour sheets, adding a winch and adding final details such as rivets.
Thank you for going through this really long OP and I hope to have some feedback to improve this model. I'm sorry that I've gone so far into this project before creating this thread.