Rapid Prototyping and You

So, I learned this cool technique for rapid prototyping in concept art recently. It's pretty fundamental but hey, I've not used it before!

Basically, you create quick component pieces of what you want to create. Legs, arms, heads, basic body shapes, accessories, etc. It works well for cars, aliens, animals..anything really, but when I first heard the idea, robots seemed like the best fit for an initial try!

As such, I created the above, a selection of 'ROBOT PARTS', as I've so mysteriously named. It's a pretty safe set that didn't take me very long to mock up. The important things to remember here are:

a. We're focusing on the profile of the image

b. Shapes should fit together ~relatively~ well with little editing.

From here it was pretty easy to mock up some initial robot designs:

I've obviously added some small features to individual ones here, hanging wires, lights and the like, but overall almost all elements are available in the initial spec.

And I strongly believe that if I'd just tasked myself with creating 4 robots from scratch, I wouldn't of created anything so detailed with such funky outlines, and definitely not so quickly!

Go on, touch it!

Would appear I was suffering for artist's block again recently. Usually I try to sketch it out, creating rough shapes and seeing what I can turn it into, or doing circle practice (drawing rough circles with my wrist, then elbow, and finally shoulder).

It felt like none of these were working for me, so, to avoid the mental block that creativity was imposing on me, I decided to partake in some material studies, and here are the results!

Leather

Steel

 Rock

The originals are, of course, on the left while my spherical interpretations are on the right. 

Both attempting to mimic a material while attempting to turn it into an unnatural shape was damn good practice, but still made me feel like I hadn't achieved enough.

So I made a house with a cool pool in Sketch-Up.

Rather happy with it, and while you can't see it from here, there's also a loft indoors with a ladder leading up and a bed.

Always entertaining to learn how to use a new piece of software!