The Birth of 'SteamBot'

SteamBot - Older cousin of 'DiscoverBot' from last year's Animation work - was an idea hatched as I was collecting images around the Museum of Power. As the organic facial modelling of the last few weeks revealed... organic models are not a friendly thing to work with. An organic character to present the working model would be tricky to pull of... particularly as it needed to be high quality (A weak model of an attempt of a human would hinder the video more than help it). The idea of a contraption-style character also seemed appropriate... and thus the idea came forth. Another robot! DiscoverBot was quite handy last year, in its ability to be relatively easy to model and move... but have a strong professionalism about it. Another robot seemed ideal, only this time, it would be Steam-Powered! And so, SteamBot was born...

This part was by far the worst part of modelling SteamBot (No, really), and this bit alone took several hours. The central frame (Box, push the top vertices inwards slightly) was easy... but the trim was pure evil. I was hindered by the fact that Boolean and ProBoolean use up a lot of processing memory and would drastically increase the file size... and these would be better saved for the Harwoods to use for the train model (Which, to be fair, is more important!). Now trying to punch a hole in the middle of a square/cube is not even funny. Several failed attempts later and I ended up with this (Sadly, I can't even remember how I managed to do it by this point). Unfortunately, I've literally only just thought up a way to have done this with little effort. Pick 'tube' 3D shape, and set sides to 4. Viola... a square tube... just what I could have done with. Damn.

From the chaos that was the trim/frame... the rest was plain sailing. The rivets were then added to the model (A ton of spheres placed in the corners of each side)

The finished chassis was completed by cloning the entire top-section, and re-sclaing it to create what is now the bottom-section of the chassis. The final touch here was to add a pair of super-cute eyes (2 more spheres). Congratulations... it's a baby SteamBot!