Robotrio Behind the Scenes: Castilles in 3D

The robo-racer Castilles arrives! 

As with Dant, Castilles started out as a blueprint, just so I could get an idea of his exact proportions before getting to work. The blueprint served as a perfect reference as an in-Blender background; guesswork based on episode/short-based screenshots wouldn't have turned out half as well without a good 2D starting point. 

Some factors, including his lower limbs and head, were notably easier than some of my other work, since they can easily be drawn from distorted and/or extruded cubes. The mouth, at least in Castilles' head was perhaps the easiest of the three, being a simple distorted cube. The mouth, at least in its current form, was done through an interesting mix between an armature bone for the jaw and shape keys for the overall mouth shape (and compensating for any weirdness that the first option leaves), meaning that all three robots currently have three different mouth styles.The canonically expressive visor, though, was far more complicated, using 9 bones for its various point--essentially one bone per two vertices!

The torso was definitely the hardest part--so much so that I felt the need for more than one torso reference! Still, I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with: a cylinder with parts of its sides extruded and flattened. The black "creases" would probably curve inward and be thinner on a more realistic model, but I went for a more literal approach--slightly creased on-model (as requested by Lei), but with a pure black material. 

For his portrait, I want for a more realistic atmosphere, depicting what life may be like casually racing along the alleys of Limbersdale by night. Now that I think about it, all three portraits explored lighting a little more than my previous work--Ace's included simulated light from an open window, Dant's toyed with an emissive-by-default sky texture, and with Castilles, I got to experiment with street lamp-style lighting. Another point I tried to keep in mind was that 3D work is at its best when it looks used; as a result, I added some crumbled papers, a metal fuse-like box, and even a paper stuck to the brick wall.

It's been fantastic being able to bring these three into 3D, and I'm loving being a part of the Robotrio crew!