Al Howe
3D Project List

Robot Girl

Robot Girl is a project I set for myself to keep up on my 3D character design. Modeled, mapped, and rigged completely in 3ds Max 9. I set a limit of 5000 tris for the robot, and it came in just below at 4998. In my original design she was gold with green fire for hair. After trying out several colors, I settled for blue armor and opted for a weathered, battle-worn look.

The fire/hair was made with several simple particle systems. For the fire I was thinking as a kind of "fire of life," some kind of phenomenon to explain how this robot became intelligent, yet also serving as an analog for hair. The fire is generated around her head, like a metal ball heated to the point where the atmosphere bursts into flame around it. Except her head isn't that hot and it's not true fire. The "fire" burns without consuming fuel or making exhaust.

Several final poses of the robot girl.

Below is the original concept for the robot girl, the initial model, and a checker texture on the model after setting up the Unwrap Mapping layout.

This picture shows the final modeled robot girl (4998 tris), a high-poly version of the robot (548,516 tris) used to make the Normal map, and the low-poly robot with the Normal map on it.

Final maps used in the project. The final maps are 2048x2048.

The rig for the robot. This rig includes twist bones at the wrists, shoulders, and hips. There are facial bones so I can animate her face, or set up a specific look. For her feet, I set up helpers to control all possible types of rotation, including the knee, and I made a similar, but simpler, rig for the hands.

Here is an example image showing her initial texturing. After getting comments from others, I got rid of the lighter colored metal parts and made a few other small changes.

Several images of the robot with different colors of fire. I really like how the purple fire looks, but decided to stick with the green for now. If she were in a game, I imagine there would be several different color versions, or you could customize the armor and fire colors separately.