ZBrushCentral

BioShock inspired Robot

So I’ve been playing Bioshock a bunch lately and was somewhat inspired by the big daddy designs. The concept here is a robot who intakes air through the front to build heat that the robot radiates through its forearms and it’s head. the tubes move the pressurized heat to where they are expelled. I reused bit’s from another sculpt for the boots and gloves. The original robot would’ve been used as a welder but the design modified to function as a weapon. anyways these are just raw renders and I obviously have a lot more work to do but I just wanted to share. Would love to hear peoples input to help me formulate what direction to take this.

Attachments

untitled.173.jpguntitled.174.jpgJust made some small tweaks but I would really appreciate feed back so I can improve as an artist.

Coming together nicely! Something about the shape and scale of the boots is throwing things off. Almost reminiscent of clown shoes ;). Keep up the great progress!

Just made some small tweaks but I would really appreciate feed back so I can improve as an artist.

Bioshock always inspires me to do some sculpting too! I try to play it every year around Halloween. I’ve always meant to create a Big Daddy, but have never gotten around to it.

Since you asked, it’s difficult to provide much feedback at this point because you’re still in the concepting stage. I don’t really have a clear idea of what sort of style you’re going for yet–realistic hard surface, or a more cute, cartoonish style.

As far as design critique, I think it’s important to have a clear idea of the nature of your subject in mind. You’ve described it as a robot–a purely mechanical construct. This is easy to see on the torso where you’ve got nicely articulated machine-precise ball joints showing the mechanical nature of the arms and how they move. It’s a bit murkier on the lower body though, where the legs look doughy and organic. Now, you could explain that away in your head as some sort of mechanics under a flexible rubber exterior, but as visual artists we’re somewhat bound by the old actor’s adage of “show, don’t tell”. I think you should decide whether your subject is a completely mechanical creature, or a guy in a suit like the Big Daddies, and communicate that idea clearly. That means the legs would need broken up somehow, with clear visual clues as to how they move and function, like you’ve established with the arms.

As far as advice, have you tried sketching your idea by hand first? You don’t have to be great at drawing. Just get an initial concept down in sketch form first. It’s a much faster way to make changes to a design, and can serve as a roadmap to your modelling and sculpting work, greatly speeding the process since you know what you want to do. You can always refine that concept as you model.

At this stage, and again I can’t tell how much of this is stuff you haven’t gotten around to fixing yet, I would say your piece is having trouble finding the right balance between mechanically precise hard surface forms, and softer organic curves. It’s a robot, so you expect a lot of clean, crisp edges. Some areas look a bit too soft and doughy in comparison with others.

It looks like you’re having some creasing problems around the holes in the forearms, which is a common issue when applying creasing on curved surfaces. If you’d like, because we Bioshock fans have to stick together, I could give you some tips on solving the “crisp circular holes on curved surfaces” problem in Zbrush. But I don’t want to post pictures uninvited on someone else’s image thread.

Be sure to get comfortable using the Zmodeller edge creasing functions. Zmodeler is going to be invaluable for work like this.