Retro Robot

My final project before the Final Major Project of uni was to fully concept, model, texture and rig a retro robot that looked like it belongs in the 1950s. My aim for this project was to meet every requirement in the brief including stretch goals and other extras. This ambitious goal was to show off all of my abilities in a portfolio piece that will impress employers. The reason for choosing this project over a purely concepting project was to show my strengths which are: idea generation, colour design and knowledge of surface material/PBR.

I was looking for interesting objects with significant silhouettes that belong in the 1950s for example, blenders and old gas pumps. I created two mood boards with images that inspired me.

Next I used the mood board to generate some silhouettes and used the mood boards to create my own designs.

Overall I found that the designs I made, came out too complex and futuristic, however, I thought that I may as well use the one that I found fit in the 1950s the most. I found myself struggling with designing something that is going to be iconic and decided to scrap the first concept stage and look into what the 50s were all about. There were two ways to approach this, I could have gone for a more iconic design or a simple robot toy that would have been around in the 50s. Looking into what was popular at the time turned me on to the style of American diners and fancy cars.

At that point I had an exact image in my head of the final product, I sketched out some designs to create a rough concept.

With an image in my head, I started to create a theme and a setting that I wanted this character to belong to. Even though I had an image in my head, I found that my concept was still lacking details that would really enhance the design.

So I went through another designing stage for a more in depth development, this lead me to creating orthographic and 3/4 views for modelling reference.

Because of the really clear concept, I already knew exactly what the final product would look like and that really helped me cut down on time spent on colour design. I spent some of the extra time gained, I looked into surface design by gathering reference to support me while texturing.