I’ve been making an ear’ole on the babys hat to let the sound in. Bless him! It needs some screw holes to hold it on, and i’m getting to them! Here is an instructional jpeg on how I built it. OMG!

Here, we see a NURBS surface, scaled to the shape I want the ear piece to be. In the second pic, amazing shapes are drawn over the sphere in an orthagonal view.

Now see! The magic! Loft the crazy curve shape through the sphere and intersect the surfaces to create curves on the actual surface of the sphere! Then use the awesome offset curve on surface tool to create outlines bigger and smaller than the original shape. Whhoooo there! What are they? They are our guides for our bevels and no less! Now, convert the original NURBS to polys and use the old NURBS sphere as a LIVE surface to draw all the nice vents on. Now bevel the nessecary edges and BBOOOP! We have a lovely perfect poly surface which will smooth down a treat should we need it to look smooth like a butter square.

Well that was utter bollocks. Hope you don’t try to do this, cause it’s late, my girlfriends waiting for me, and that all made no sence. They call me the professor…….. Get your specs on.

I know i’ve got to UV this sucker at some point, and I know it’s going to make me cry drops of water onto my crumpets, so I’ve been doing a little bit here, a little bit there, so I don’t have to tackle it all at once in some mighty horrible mission. I don’t want loads of texture on him, just a dash, but i’m anal enough to spend forever making sure when I get round to painting, it’s all sorted. Heres how much i’ve done so far on the jaw.

Uvs, in case you don’t know, turn the 3D space of the model into 2D, U and V, coordinates, so artists who can weld the pencil, can draw all over it as if it were a latrine wall. Its abit like flattening out a big box. In 2D space, the above looks like this.

A clever chap could cut all this out, fold it up, and make a real life version of the character! Amazing! Please do. The downside is that they are so irritating to make. And boring. Dull as a board and crap like a poo.

Celebrate the world in colour with me! Finally, I’m working out a colour scheme for one of these characters. I really want this guy to be rendered so he seems to be in a different space to the other characters. His worlds gonna be one of colour and plastic delight! Im going for a real simple scheme, classic baby I call it, powder blue and pink. Hopefully he’s starting to look a bit like a crap Fisher Price toy.

That stupid sploge on his head has got to go soon, but before I got onto the actual proper work of making the hat look any good, I chucked in a lovely curly aeriel that`ll bend around like Billy o’ when he moves about.

I’ve been trying to refine the silhouette on this character. Working out the old nose and in with a new one that makes the robot look more infanitle, and more creepy.

An ambient occlusiuon, and a quick material render, of the current face. The jaws only got an up down motion, but then all this character really needs to do is zoom around in a small car smashing into things! WEEEE!

Its completly ovious, but the eye spots are added with a brush in photoshop after. Thats one click of the mouse for each spot! How`d you like them apples?

Heres a close up of the jaw currently. Its the most complicated mechanical peice in the model. As soon as I can work out how to imbed videos I’ll slip one right in to one of these entries.

Stop it already!

Quick experinent I did while itterating on the face shapes. I thought I might go for a cut up, I-robot look. Looked shit. Do not want.

A few big boy posts to come here. I’ve been offline, or working to hard to touch this stuff for a year and a half now! NOOO! Still, finally i’m back, redesigned the site a bit. You like? In my spare seconds i’ve been cracking on the 3rd character for the movie, and its coming along finally. But first - check out this pic of how it started. HHHMMMM…. Not feeling it yet?