Busting Blueprints | A Cleared Vision for the Body

    After struggling last week to get a solid model going for the body I thought it necessary to return to the drawing board and create some clear points to model from. The concept was fine in regards to general ideas and it worked better for the head, but with the body being more mechanical than ornamental.

    I started with the cockpit where I realized that there is a separation between the cockpit itself and the bracer that connects it to the body.

    Next, I realized that it was an error in judgement to reference the Vincent over one of the Knights of the Round's Knightmare Frames. I began referring to the Lancelot as it is the more basic of the lot.

    In my rendition I wanted to shorten the height and width of the cockpit to be more streamlined and aesthetically pleasing. Mechanically damage would assure the pilot's death, but it's meant to fail when the battle has been absolutely lost.

    The bracer is connected to the cockpit. It keeps it secured to the body. This may experience a slight change in shape but the idea is the same.

    Now looking at the Lancelot I can only speculate about how the bracer connects to the base skeleton of the machine. I am under the impression the decorative front hides the points that keep everything all connected.

    This bracer will be a separate piece. Much like making a game, if you don't ever see it there is no need to make it. I left a gap for the arm connector at that is going to be a separate piece for what I believe to be easier topology.

    So I was struggling with how I planned to make the arms and legs connect to the torso and hips.

    Then, it came to me. I remembered a very, very specific point in the show where they showed an arm being attached as a temporary measure. 

    Unfortunately, due to the fact this was only available on Netflix I couldn't screen shot it, so I had to reference it off the freeze frame.

    It was essentially a cylinder with extrusions and posts and posts atop extrusions. Knowing this I was also able to see how the arm connects here.

    Within the base of the arm is a simpler connector that has posts that insert directly into the holes in the torso. 

    Now an issue I had was how the limb bends at the elbow. It appears to be a pin that goes inside through to a gap in the upper arm joint.

    There has been no depiction in the entirety of the two seasons of the show and three recap films of how the leg connects into the hips. So I presumed the mechanism was the same. 

    I really opted to break the pieces into very general base forms.

    The most complicated I got was in the torso, hip region. Again like much of the function of the legs I had to figure out for myself how the torso rotates on the hips.

    I spent little time considering options and instead went for the approach that the simplest answer is the right one. In my case I just assumed the hips and torso were connected via a scaled up version of the arm/leg connector. 

    The plating that surrounds the hips I left out for the time being as that can be extruded upon when the body is more built out. This may necessitate an additional section in the body.

    Lastly I just jotted out same armor plating on the leg. I focused more upon the plating than the base skeleton because it made up more of what was seen.

    The knee is the only joint exposed, so I drew out a simple top down of how the mechanism works. I recognized early on that I didn't need to focus on real mechanization just what implies that something powers limb rotation.

    The plating itself makes up what most of the leg is. You never actually see how the base of the leg looks so I wanted to go slightly based off of Ultraman's color scheme.

    This week I'm upset I didn't reach a point that I felt confident I could model in a productive way. I'm learning to measure twice model once if you will. I learned in the past that when I spend less time figuring out exactly what I'm doing I spend more time lost and figuring out issues that could have been solved had I just blueprinted more. 

    I hope the extensive work and research I put into making sure that I have as few design issues going forward and I can enjoy the process of modeling. The upcoming week I want to have these pieces modeled and a blueprint of how the arm and leg will deviate from the base form of the Lancelot. I want to put Hadron cannons that emanate from the fore arms in loo of Ultraman's spacium beam. But I won't get ahead of myself.