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.

Hope your ready for an image dump...

So these are the best of the image that I have collected. They are a mixture of 2D and 3D and a mixture of styles. There are some images where I like the whole design and some where I only like small elements, and plenty in between. All of these images resulted from simple google searches for generic terms and I simply saved the results that I liked the most. I will follow this post up with an analysis of the elements that I think I like and will therefore try to include in my armour design. Here we go!

So what have I learnt from all these? Well the most obvious answer to that question is in the helmet, I definitely like them to be faceless, that doesn't necessarily mean featureless, but having no visible eye slot or hole is a big plus. Having lights or cameras or something in place of lights but not quite positioned correctly is even better. In fact lights in general seem to be pretty good, for eyes, on weapons, around exhausts, its all good.

The second point is that I seem to be fond of armour with very smooth panels and sharp edges. I feel like this leads to the most futuristic look. Too many sharp edges could lead things to be blocky and bulky more like an '80s imagining of the future but smooth panels with sharp definition lines is more like a 2011 view of the future.

The trends I'm seeing in terms of the armours mobility is to have large panels across the big body parts with the pieces getting smaller and more complex on the areas where flexibility is needed. Armoured parts combined with a kind of stiff rubber or other semi-flexible material under suit is an idea that gets repeated a lot and I am quite a fan of.

In general I quite like complex but minimal shapes in the armour panels. What I mean by this is that the armour appears quite faceted with many sharp angle changes and planes, but it is not cluttered up with lots of extra bits, like pouches, straps, pockets, holsters, if those things exist the have been hidden away or designed into the armour itself.

PS. I do not own any of these images and they are property of their respective owners.

This has cleared my mind up in terms of the design elements that I want to include and give me some more topics to research. Next time I'll be looking at real armours and hard surfaces which may have elements to incorporate into my design. Stay tuned...

Research

Now that I have a pretty good idea of what I actually want to do and what the outcome will be I have to begin research to make sure I can actually do it. As covered in my previous post there are a number of research areas to look into before I can really start work.

At the most basic level these are: armour research to help in my concept design, sculpting research to make sure I know how to actually make this thing, and a lot of smaller peripheral topics like my dynamic effects.

First up, the design. Concept research is a multi pronged attack. I want my armour design to be realistic, obviously nothing like this currently exists and therefore I will be imagining a fair chunk of my design, however I want to make sure it is based in reality. This means I need to look for all of the real reference that I can and use the ideas contained within when designing my armour suit. I will be looking at what really exists today as these inventions are the ground work that an armour design like mine will eventually grow from.

With the present covered I will also be turning to the past for some tips. It has been many centuries since mankind has used plate armour but there were more centuries before that where they did. They faced a similar challenge that I am, protection vs manoeuvrability, and they came up with lots of answers. I will be taking a leaf out of their book to see how they made plates slide over one another to give the wearer the most flexibility possible.

And finally I shall be looking to the future, kind of. Nothing like my eventual armour design exists but similar designs have been created in a non-functional way. Costume armour like created for the movie Iron Man doesn't have all of the features that the movie would have you believe, but it was created as a full scale wearable suit that someone had to move in. Seeing how this more modern design achieved similar results to that of medieval armour could give me an insight into how to go about my design.

However, making the suit realistic enough is only one stage of the design phase, it also needs to look awesome. As such I am gathering as much reference material from across the web as I can. When I have gathered as many pictures of sci-fi armour that I think looks great I can try and distill what it is exactly that makes it aesthetically appealing and then put that into my armour. I already have lots of images so I will be looking through them and showing off the best ones here in a coming post.

I will also be covering the other area of research in a following post. Continue to watch this space for more major project news.