03/15/2021 – This will be a shorter post detailing the work I did yesterday evening and today. I was inspired by some of the armatures in the Dreadnought teaser trailer along with scissor lifts for the interior of the Achilles’s weapons bay. Here’s some progress screenshots from throughout the day:
The structure came together very rapidly which was quite nice. The teeth of that inset gear structure were made using SpeedCut, the rest of the details using Maya’s basic Boolean functionality. It’s less apparent in the following screenshots but the elbow joint is slightly different from the other two: Those two are the motors that are rotating their respective upper and lower arm pieces, with the elbow simply allowing both to rotate and thus translate.
There were several net gains for adding in detail like this. One, it’s always wonderful to include functional detail in the model, especially in points of interest. Anything animated is going to naturally draw the eye, and the ventral weapons bay with the giant superweapon in it is a natural place for the eye to be drawn. Two, my instincts as an amateur are often to create what’s good enough for the videogame environment – it’s almost impossible for the player to see into this bay like this. Stretching my muscles with higher fidelity artwork is nice practice. Three, with the bay open using simple elevators there’s awkward negative space between the main body of the ship and the belly bay. Adding this in fills in that negative space with interesting visual detail. The trick is making it fit without aggressive clipping.
I experimented with a number of possible locations – this one is awkward as it’s on the outside of the bay. It would be covered whenever the bay is not in use, but it’s still not exactly heavily armored and feels rather haphazard / slapdash. There’s also a good view of the altered elbow joint in the above screenshot.
This was the position I was most strongly considering at the end of the day. It doesn’t clip into anything too terribly but would still clearly need adjustment to really fit in. The weapons bay itself slides up to fit over the main body of the fighter slightly, so the fact that this armature I’ve modeled is linear is a problem. Tweaking the lower or upper arm so they’re not in line might make it fit a lot better.