Designing New Drone Enemy [Haca Fairstalk Animation]

Just got back from California and I'm ready to get back to work on some new artwork. For those that didn't know, I spent the past week in San Jose teaching kids about Maya at iD Tech Camp. My students were very advanced and we got through a ton of content in such a short time. We went over modeling tools, animation, lighting, cameras, Mudbox, and even some UV mapping. And best of all, I got the chance to play with a 3D printer! It was a super fun week full of friends new and old, and now I'm even more excited to spend the summer at the iD Gaming Academy at Stanford.

With this re-invigorated passion for 3D modeling, I got right back to work on my Haca Fairstalk project. I promised more frequent bite-sized posts so I'll keep this somewhat short.

As part of the animation, Haca is running through this tattered junkyard doing all kinds of acrobatic flips and maneuvers. I wanted there to be some kind of conflict but creating another full character would be too time consuming. So instead I got the idea of some kind of small but destructive robots. I've been wanting to create more hard surface models with complex mechanical rigging, so an attack drone seemed like the perfect solution.

I scoured the web for all kinds of references and came up with these sketches. This drone is called Divith Geiger 107. I want it to have some elements of horror sci-fi while still maintaining believable mechanics. It has a hard layered shell on top which houses an eyeball camera on a crane. Below the body, it carries a high powered rifle for picking off its targets.

After coming up with the design, I put together a prototype in Maya using primitive shapes. This is to help visualize some of the movements that the propeller makes.

Here is a short playblast of the propeller retracting into the base of the drone. Probably going to scale up the size of the blades.

Next on the agenda is creating primitives for other movable parts and then I can move on to the actual models for the drone. Next post should be a bit more visually appealing so look forward to that. Until next time... Adios!