Step by step

 From an initial thumb nail sketch with only very rough ideas I was able to take my favourite parts of the original sketch, the high collar, fold back communication antenna, and the general mask design and refine them into a full armour concept. From here I ditched the second collar, took some design elements further and then designed a concept for what the rest of the armour would look like based on the styling of the limited amount seen so far. Again many parts of this armour concept appealed to me and they are what led me to the decision to take the design further.

In the design I incorporated some of the ideas I had developed around joint flexibility with panels visible at the elbows designed to slide over and under one another to remain flexible whilst providing upmost protection. I decide that the second high collar would be mostly pointless, and made the wearer look like they had abnormally long shoulders. The fold away antenna took me in the direction of having many essential gadgets be able to fold away. There are parts on the side of the lower leg, the ribs and also the collar that would eventually become deployable jet nozzles for use in flight. I was very aware how similar to Iron man this concept could become and so I was keen to keep a safe distance whilst simultaneously not deciding to do things differently simply because Marvel did them first. With this in mind, and the fact that I wanted my suit to be more realistic, I wanted to stay well away from jet boots as a form of propulsion and palm blasters as the main weapon. It was the separate arm cannons  that actually led to the most interest and change as I took my concept the next step forwards.

I had drawn the cannons in a way which made them look very detachable, almost like they could be removed and swapped out for a different weapons load depending on the suits use and mission. Having added these modular weapons I also opted to add some slots on the thigh and shoulders like these would be the receiving bays for other weapons or add-ons. This was a very interesting idea to me, as I think it is very similar to what the real military would actually do. Not every mission needs the same kit, nor every soldier, so they are given different weapons and equipment but with the same base protection and uniform. My suit would be that base, and the modular accessories would make it useful in a variety of military theatres. I wanted to take this idea further, and also to add some complexity to the somewhat plain armour, as such I began developing the same suit with a few alternative parts.

As I began adapting the armour I made the decision that the pop out jets that I had designed were somewhat impractical and also a little too futuristic, I wanted to take them back a step. I replaced the parts on the ribs and collar with a jet pack and swapped the legs for small modular jets. This facilitated the collar being significantly reduced in size, so that it was much closer to the neck. The only other major change was to the thighs and biceps. The thighs were adapted to look like they could handle more flexibility and both parts were increased in complexity to add a better aesthetic quality. The design as a whole had small elements added to it, these make it look more like many smaller armour plates, and make it look more like it actually has a function and could exist in the real world. 

Upon finishing this design I knew it was the design I was going to make, and I could finally move from pre-production into production. Time to get my hands dirty in ZBrush

Getting closer...

Having gone through all of my previous designs and picked out my favourite elements I decided that I was quite happy with a number of the helmets which I had drawn but there were hardly any full armour concepts I liked. This isn't to say I disliked everything I had drawn, merely I wasn't happy with any of the full armours that had been drawn up. There were elements I liked, and designs with a small amount of armour roughed out that I wanted to explore further. As such I set out to take the best concepts and draw them up in full suits of head to toe armour. However I would make sure to concentrate on the body and not the head, as I had already drawn many, many helmets and didn't need to design any more. As such most of the below helmets are only place holders and may be replaced later.

With this in mind I set out to explore one full concept or design in each suit I drew. I started with a suit that was meant to provide maximum coverage with minimum restrictions to movement (top left and centre). I used a lot of the research I had done when creating the paper armour to figure out how to try and solve the mobility issues. The idea was basically to have all of the panels be able to slide over one another to keep things covered but also flexible. 

The next concept I tried working with was a more basic and realistic (top right), for this I went back to the tried and tested method of having larger plates over some less protective but more flexible under armour. I particularly wanted to show the roughness of this design with the large fastenings, basic panel shapes, and the use of current weaponry and extra armour.

The next set of designs I worked up were based on armour concepts I had drawn in the previous round but wanted to see as a full suit. The first design (bottom left) was based on a drawing showing the suit from the waist up, and I particularly liked the arms and shoulders of this design as well as the large panels on the hips. I set about continuing the style of my favourite parts across the whole suit, designing legs and redesigning the chest and abs of the suit.

Next up was a much more futuristic design that ended up being a little too sci-fi with not enough grounding in reality (bottom centre). The original design had been almost full body, but had been around a feminine form, I decided to redraw it over a male body as I am more familiar with the body shape and so that it was more in keeping with the other designs. The design is sleek and futuristic but also doesn't appear to offer the level of coverage and protection I am after.

Finally I worked up a design which had previously only been the shoulders and head of the suit, but I had really like the helmet a lot. One of the main features of the previous design had been a large double collar around the head, which I liked but wanted to reduce to a single layer. When I drew the collar onto the base figure it became apparent that only a single collar would fit in place anyway. I expanded the style of the design to encompass the whole suit and developed something that ended up with a great middle point between futuristic but realistic too. I decided that this design should have built-in weapons mounted onto the forearms, but that they would be modular, so they could be removed and swapped out as the mission dictated. This lead to the design being covered in these modular slots, so many weapons or extra armour could be added.

Eventually I decided that this was the design that I liked most and that it would be the design that I wanted to continue with. However there were still some things I wanted to tweak before I was ready to start sculpting it. Nearly there....

Designs, designs, designs, choices, choices, choices.

 I went about the design stage of this project with the intention of getting every idea I possibly could down on paper, (or digital paper). From these I could choose my favourite designs or bits of designs and put them all together into a smaller series of better options.

With this in mind I started sketching out absolutely anything that came to mind, no idea was too strange or too ridiculous. There were two kinds of design during this process that I tried to explore; intentional and accidental.

When I say intentional I mean I went into the drawing with some idea of what it was that I wanted to create. Obviously every design was supposed to show some armour in some way but I might go in with the idea that this exact design has to incorporate a lot of pipes, or maybe I wanted big clunky armour for this design which would be more of a walking tank than a suit or armour. If it was an overall idea, or a mental image of a small part of the design, I would scribble it down, in many cases trying to design a suit around that feature that fit with the visual style.

However more of these designs I went into either with no idea what I wanted to draw or with a deliberately blank mind. I started by exploring abstract shapes and bizarre forms, but soon realised this was not going to work for my project. This armour is meant to be a robot style suit, I knew I would break a few of the rules of anatomy in the process but I still knew every design would have two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. There was definitely room for some imaginative wiggle room around this, but the basic silhouette of the armours would be very similar, both to each other, and to a normal human.

I found from this that rather than crafting strange silhouettes to create something with a visually unique form, I needed to explore each design with more detail. I still intended to attempt to cause happy accidents that would influence my design in ways I would not have thought of but it needed to be with details as well as larger shapes. Often this meant I would start to scribble in the rough shape of a person and see what forms the lines created. For anyone interested I started sketching in Photoshop but moved to Autodesk's SketchBook Pro. The drawings in SBP feel much more like drawing with a real pencil, and there are less features getting in the way of a simple sketch. Plus you can draw in symmetry which helped me to speed up considerably.

I scribbled and scribbled every design I could think of and tried to discover all of the ones that I couldn't. Some designs were just helmets, others torsos, and even a few full designs. Some designs were taken to full completion, and others abandoned part way through lack of interest, or further ideas. Their are side views and front views, some combos of the two and a handful of 3/4 views just to mix things up. All in all I ended up sketching 52 drawings, 43 helmets, 22 torsos, 18 arms and 15 legs.

Once it was all done and my brain was drained of all creative thoughts, I sat down and went through every design making notes of the sections I liked and the sections I didn't. This was a very interesting process as it is not something that I have done before. It was also interesting to look at each design in an objective way, and finding that the majority of the time every design had both good and bad points.

The next stage is to take all of these good design points and put them all together into a small collection of designs. This may been putting a number of good parts into a single design, or could be further exploring part of a design to create a suit around it. Apologies for the large image, I wanted to make sure all of the images were viewable at the size they were displayed. Enjoy.

Just another day at the office...

How exactly to you design a product the likes of which you have never seen for real, never held or tried? Thinking about it is a good start, sketches work well if your a visual person but ultimately it all ends up with prototyping.

How exactly do you figure out how far up your bicep an armour plate can come before it will start to restrict your ability to lift your arm? Prototyping.

So thats what I did. I sat down with a bunch of scrap paper and started to tape it into the right shapes on myself. Follow that up with some cutting away the restrictive/uncomfortable bits. Move your arm every way you can think of. Rinse and repeat until you end up with a paper shape that shows you the maximum amount of coverage can achieve without sacrificing any manoeuvrability.

I ended up making a forearm, bicep, shoulder and neck piece. It wasn't that easy especially trying to measure and cut bits off of the paper shapes all with one hand. However it did pay off, I very quickly discovered that my assumptions about where plates would have to finish were very wrong. Some plates can cover so much more space that you would think, whilst some cover even less than you imagine.

When I got onto the drawing stage the research that I had done here turned out to be highly valuble. I not only realised the the plates could look different than I was thinking but I also figured out some clever ways to get around the problem areas. Having only been able to construct the arm pieces I felt draw in the leg sections, obviously these test had had more affect on me than I realised. Ultimately I don't want to stray too far from common conceptions even if they are wrong. Movies are plagued by factual inaccuracies that must be perpetuated, because if the audience thinks its right even if its not you have to do it that way, else they will think it is wrong. There is no point in me changing the way the armour works to be more accurate if it looks more wrong to the viewer.

Luckily for me, nothing of this sort exists and most people haven't ever worn armour of any kind so if I show the ability to flex in a slightly unrealistic way they will likely buy it, but I don't want to push that too far.

So with my mind map dealing with the practical extras that need to be thought about when designing the full feature suit, and my paper armour informing me about how to layout the plates, I can begin to focus on the fun part. What it all actually looks like. TO THE DRAWING BOARD!!!!

Thought tempest

Character designing begins!!! 

One of the things I knew I wanted to do with my designs was get a really great balance between being visually exciting and believably realistic. With a sci-fi design it is far too easy to go down the aesthetically awesome route and ignore reality when it gets in the way of your imagination, however the brief behind my project dictates that the design must fit the story, and the story is in the not too distant future. With this in mind I will be going about my designs with the idea that the technology has to pretty much exist today. This is meant to be cutting edge armour, and there is that rumour that military tech is always ten years ahead of public stuff, so I'm going to be able to push believability a little, but I want the audience to believe that this suit really could exist. 

The military use of this suit is actually very important. As I begun drawing I thought about what the military would do, based on what they have done before, and it dawned on me that in all military designs form follows function. They don't really care what things look like as long as they work perfectly. With this in mind I realised that my designs would have to be drawn with each panel, joint and division carefully planned and questioned as to why it was there. This looked like a job for a mind map. By thinking about all of the features the suit would have to have I could make sure they were incorporated into the design, and extra useless bits didn't manage to sneak in.

Hopefully you can read some of it:

If you take a look at that you will realise that I broke the armour down into its main functions it must perform and attempted to delve as deep as possible into each sub-category that arouse. Whilst the mind map proved to be incredibly useful, it did seem that the majority of what was effected where the small details. It helped me remember to add thruster nozzles and exhaust vents but it didn't affect the majority of the armour designs.

I knew pretty early on that I wanted the armour to be an all over suit rather than larger plates on top of an under suit because I couldn't design flexible elbow armour. This meant I needed to figure out the few really tough areas that most armours generally don't protect or prevent adequate movement, the arm pit, elbow, groin, knees and neck. Some testing was needed...

Time Line

Over the last few weeks I have been spending my time drawing for the first part of my Major Project. Seeing as my project is first and foremost about character design it is really essential that I nail the design stage of the project. As such I am trying to get out any and all ideas that I can in an effort to come up with something new and unique that looks super awesome. However in amongst all of that drawing I sat down to plan how long I should be spending on each stage of the production. 

This is important at this point because it dictates how long I can spend on each task. I believe it was someone working in Pixar who once said when asked how he knew a film was done, "A film is never finished, it just escapes". This is true with the majority of design projects I have worked on and as such it is integral to plan your time well. Hopefully this little plan will help keep my work on time and prevent me from unnecessarily rushing things and stop me having a ridiculous work load at the back end of the project.

Along with working out how long each task will most likely take I gave each an importance rating out of 10. The higher the score the more important it is to the completion of the project. As I said this is a character design project so that has a very high score, where as there are some tasks along the way which are optional. I'd love to get it all done so I present the best image of my work but also because some of it will be really fun to do or see, but plans go wrong, other things come up, and these optional tasks will be the ones to get cut if I need the extra time. 

You may also notice that some of the tasks at the very end have been removed to keep them a secret. These are some of the most optional tasks and the ones which will fall first if extra time is needed, but they are also some of the most fun ideas. If you want to see what they are then wish me luck in keeping on track, and stick around.

Its been a long time

So there was just a small gap between posts there, a mere 8 and a half months. Oops.

To quickly explain what happened, I started and completed the prep for this project in the final term of my year in 2011, much earlier than I should have due to my elective choices. This was followed by a break for the summer of two months and then me resuming my normal class structure for the following two terms, or half a year. However all that aside, I am now just 1 day away from my very first week of proper major project work and therefore the blog needs to be dug up out of the depths of the internet, dusted of, and sent back to work.

The posts from here on should be more frequent and the content more interesting as the real work on the project begins.