ALL LEGS, ALL POWER
Modeled in Blender. Textured in Substance Painter
PROCESS BREAKDOWN
I challenged myself to design, model, and texture a robot in a week.
When I was designing, my mind kept going to the Vocaloid meme Shiteanyo (pictured below). I thought this meme was the funniest thing in the world in high school.
In an attempt to make peace with how wildly embarrassing I was as a teenager and to see if I could use the same, excellent character design approach, I decided to create a robot that was all leg.
Drew out a quick sketch. Not a concept artist, drew out enough to get some idea of how this could look.
To help flesh out the design, gathered additional references, looking for polished concepts to inform how joints would link together.
A half completed sketch and some references is all a startup forged TA needs so I jumped into Blender and started modeling.
As I worked, toggled back and forth between solid and rendered views. This allowed me to have a consistent understanding of both the shape and how basic lighting would affect detail appearance.
(Bonus, if you love making art but get trapped in a pendulum swing between hyperfixation and dissociation, entertaining yourself with a little Blender light show keeps focus on track).
When I moved to the texturing stage, I initially wanted to create a cute, bubbly look. But it wasn’t clicking and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere.
In frustration, I threw on Substance’s creature tooth material. I expected to immediately undo, but liked how it changed the tone. It took the robot from “hehe a leggy bot, with dinky propellers” to a machine that had faced the ravages of time. The contrast between silly character design and the severity of the material pulled me in as I worked and began to imagine the world this robot walked through.
The instability of the meme-inspired design began to paint a clearer picture of how the robot’s life started. This wasn’t the kind of precise mechanical excellence produced in factories. Instead, it felt hand-crafted. And I realized with each element of decay I added, whoever had painstakingly poured their heart into crafting this robot was now long gone, unable to service the dents and disrepair acquired over the years.
While the weight of that felt heavy, the silliness of the design began to even the tone out. The propellers started to look like something the robot had stuck on itself. What if it wasn’t just the robot’s creators who had perished, but all of mankind? The robot would have had to learn how to navigate barren wastelands with a body that wasn’t designed to do so. I imagined it trying to walk through sand dunes, getting frustrated as it kept toppling over, and deciding to find a solution. While the propellers weren’t a perfect fix, for a machine with no arms, they could generate enough lift to assist in traversing uneven terrain.
From joking around, to getting frustrated, to finding a story about resilience in Substance Painter, this was a blast to work on.
If I were to repeat this one week robot challenge, I’d like to focus more on the leg panels and further refine the textures to add more individuality. However, I am satisfied with the project and successfully completed it on time.