Current Project: Professor Dapper: CURRENT UPDATE: I've done a lot of "under the hood" work today by making minor adjustments to measurements to make sure everything will fit together. You won't notice most of that, but you can see the bike mode finally shaping up. The new, long pieces are the shins, which will host the wheels, which will be in the feet. The wheel wells will turn into the toes and the front one will plug into the 1 CM gap in the front of the fuselage. I would have done more, but my computer was BSODing today and I had to spend a lot of time fixing it. I don't know if it's actually fixed, but I can hope. OLD UPDATE: I did a bit more work tonight: As you can see I smoothed out the edges and remade the "fuselage." Now let's take a look at Professor D.'s robot mode and reveal what the 'D' stands for: Yes, he is wearing a tuxedo. His full name is Professor Dapper, or P. Dapper if he's in a pimping mood. OLD UPDATE: I'm not sure I'll keep the cockpit. For now it's filler while I build the rest of the alt. mode. Once I see how well everything else comes together I'll be able to make something more fitting. If you can't tell Professor D.'s going to be a motorcycle-esc vehicle. OLD UPDATE: I have started work on my next figure, which I will be calling "Professor D." until I get further along in the design. Unlike Little Orphan Android, which took inspiration from the Animated Wheelie design, this is an entirely original concept. At first glance this may look similar to Little Orphan Android because of the cockpit "chest" and the balljoint sockets to the side of the cockpit "chest," but I want you to know there's more than meets the eye to this figure. You'll see what I'm doing when I get a little further along with the design. I don't expect this will tell you guys much about my design, but I thought you guys might be interested in seeing part of my design process: I made this in Adobe Illustrator and it's the general plan for how things will be placed and an early "proof of concept" for my design. What's nice about illustrator is I can arrange and resize "parts" easily so I can get a general idea of how to start making the parts. When I did LOA I did something similar, but only on pencil and paper. Doing it on Illustrator is so much easier. ================================== Little Orphan Android: CURRENT: This is the first prototype for my Little Orphan Android figure: This thing is only a little bit bigger than a lego minifigure. Very tiny. The balljoints were printed by Shapeways way too small, so I had to spend a lot of time tightening the joints, which ended up being a little bit messy. The figure works, though, and I learned a lot about where the design is lacking. Mostly I need to change the way the balljoints were designed, but I also need to redesign the legs and chest so the wheels and cockpit plug on so they can be easily dyed instead of painted.
Here are the pictures of the wheel rotating into the crevice: How much it rotates in and out is a little disappointing, but I can always make it rotate out more and change where the place the chest slider pegs into it is. Once the fake wheel is finished it will be quite hollow and there will be a roller on the underside. Obviously, with this design, I will not be able to put the spike things on the wheels unless I do something crazy, like make those the arms. Currently my plan is for the arms to fold up and hang off the back as wheel wells. What I adore about Inventor is that I can go to any stage of the part's creation and, as long as not too many sketches are dependent on the exact geometry of that stage, I can modify the dimensions to my heart's content.
Ah. I had seen some other people post their Shapeways stuff in here a while back so I thought this is where it was supposed to go, considering the work is done virtually.
Render threads go in Fan Art. When you have actual, physical pieces of your work, certainly post a thread in Customs!
Looks very nice. The design looks solid, though some areas worry me when it comes to thin walls and parts smashing into each other. Maybe it's because I'm only seeing parts of it, but it doesn't quite get off the Aimated vibe yet. Again, maybe it's just the parts on their own that's making me say this. Still, nice job, and I need to get a copy of AI soon.
I'm not sure I can do the animated vibe, at least not with Inventor alone. I think I'll need to do a lot of modelling in 3DS Max after I get the mechanics done. Here's an update: I won't keep the chest detailing I've done, but I didn't like looking at just a flat space on the chest and I wanted an idea of what the finished product might look like. Certainly the head would be WAAAAY too big if I kept what I've done there, since it complete the cockpit. I'll need to do a lot of things to the sliding chest piece, like curve it down at the nose, hollow out the finalize chest detailing, and put in a ball socket on the top part. The last part is what of the transformation can be done right now. Basically, folding out the wheel, sliding down the chest, then putting the wheel back. The gap between the pelvis and the rear upper body will be covered by the legs. I also want to redesign the shoulder balljoint area because I had an idea that could allow for some nice poseability and would work well with putting the arms someplace.
Looking good so far. I wonder how much the thing will cost when it's completed. I have a feeling it won't be too cheap.
@Reluttr: I could make a Classics styled version and an Animated style version and put them both on Shapeways. I'd just need to do different things in 3DS Max when I get to that stage. @Soymonk: I plan to trim away as much volume as I can to make it as accessible as possible. While perhaps not feasible, I'm aiming for $70 at max. Tomorrow I'll work on making it thinner
Great looking work! For Shapeways output, hollow is your friend. For wall thickness, I'm hesitant to make anything thinner than 1.5mm, even though WSF does 1mm.
I'm trying not to go for anything less than 2.5 mm. I want this thing to have some longevity and sturdiness because no matter what it's going to cost a decent amount, I'd rather the money count for something. My balljoint cups are 5 mm on each side and from the edge of the holes, 2 mm thick. The balls will be 6.6 mm in diameter, which I calculated with the Pythagorean Theorem. I may eventually need to resize things, as it's hard to get a sense of scale from a virtual model, but that's fine. Since last night I've come up with a slightly new chassis design, so I'll need to remodel a large part of the chassis and the chest piece.
I estimate this will be ready for sale in one or two months. A couple weeks to finalize the basic design, 10 days to receive a prototype, a couple days to fix any issues I find, a week to do the sculpting, then 10 more days to received what should hopefully be the completed figure. Currently my plan is to section this figure off into multiple print batches: The fake wheel, chassis and forearms will be together in one batch so they can be printed in BSF/DGSF. The chest slider, head, hands, thighs, biceps, etc will be together so they can be printed in WSF so they can easily be dyed or painted. The face plate that will go in the head will be on its own so it can be printed in one of the High Detail materials. And one thing I was thinking about is that it'd be neat if the front wheels and roller for the fake wheel were printed in stainless steel. That could make the figure roll pretty nicely and give it a decent heft. Since they'd be such small pieces, too, they wouldn't add much to the cost. What will also be nice about parting everything out this way is it will reduce the cost of buying replacement parts.
I made a new chassis piece. This should allow for a more detailed and better proportioned robot and much less cost, especially since now the chest will be recessed into the chassis, thus can be smaller and without gaps, and the track mechanism is where the waist was on the previous version. There's a lot less volume where it doesn't matter and more where it does matter. Side view of it in vehicle mode position: Some looks in robot mode position: EDIT: One last update before I go to bed, a picture of what the car mode will kind of look like, though without the front wheels or chest detailing/cockpit: And compare it to what I showed last night for the car mode:
The way the legs will transform is that the shins will rotate out, making the wheels face behind the figure. Then the legs will hinge up on the balljoints in the hip and knee until the knee covers the slight gap left from the slider joint. The knee will have some excess plastic behind it to peg into that gap. The bottom of the shin will extend past and cover the hip's balljoint with the mounting for the foot's balljoint. Then the feet will hinge over the front of the vehicle and the heels will peg into the hollow area formed from the chest sliding down. Thus the feet will form the nose of the vehicle, the knees will cover the gaps in the vehicle, and the wheels will be right behind the mounting for the feet.