Sphere Bug
 

a mechanical bug I made. Folds out of a sphere. Mechanically correct (you could make a functioning replica), largely of piston-ish constructs. Modeling is done; I still need to rig (the legs are in temp display posistions) and (probably) texture (I'm mostly a machine modeler/rigger). Any comments?

I'm having issues posting images....

I need to get my gallery site actually working the way I want it, then I think I might have a better time of this... maybe.

Underside. Like I've said, its not rigged yet (Even with the stuff I already do know about machine rigging, its going to be slightly painful), so things are maybe slightly off, but are otherwise in their correct posistions.

Looks cool man, love to see it textured and maybe some sort of eyes on it.

The model looks great.
Dont think rigging would be too hard if u used the set driven key thing, and made the rigged legs move away from something in the nucleus of your machine.
:beer:

ehhhh.... I don't know about texturing it. I do always unwrap my models, but I'm not as enthusiastic about textures. Not quite sure why.
I kept flopping on the question of eyes, and decided to leave them off this version (but I'm sorta planning on having variants of this, so they'll probably show up on one of them).
As for driven keys.... I think they're neat in concept, I just prefer not to use them (or not so far anyways). I'll need to experiment in any case to figure out exactly what I'll need, so I might end up using them. They just always struck me as controlling motion or state in a too limited way, was the problem.

THere is a mel script on highend 3d.com, that might come in handy for you.
its do a search for "makePiston-v1[1].2-.mel" in th ehighend search box at the top and download that mel script and install it.
Works well, i've never put it to practical use but i got it when i saw it as it looked useable in the future, Created two cylinders, and rigs them to be hydrolics , sets up th eIK system and everything when you click the button.
G

Great model, the legs must have taken a while. . .
Texturing, although time consuming, could really make your machine look professional. I'm with you on the eyes, its a hard decision.
I have no experience with rigging, so I can't offer any advice there.
Great job so far!

yeah....
I'm of two minds about textures. Even if I don't texture something, I do usually unwrap it. Of course, if I add something, that would invalidate the uvmap, but ohwell.
As for rigging.... while using a script to set it up might be nice, I guess I tend to prefer to set these things up myself. And in this case, a bunch of the pistons probably couldn't be made with that script (I don't know for sure, but its my guess given the way some things actually connect). I actually think I know how to do the rigging, now, anyways.

Thanks for the comments! Of course, as I'm in the middle of the unwrap (and then the rig, I guess) there's no visible progress. I think mostly I was looking for reccommendations about the model (Like I said before, I am planning on a number of variants of this).
Thanks.

You could just make it a single shiny color.

Ah! It's now its acutally finished (well, the first version, anyways).
Rigging was easier than I expected, although still slightly time-consuming. But I think this is one of the more user-friendly rigs I've done, so it all works out.
Anyways... I mostly just applied a shiny-metal texture to it (Except the wing cases, which have a layered shader so I could put a logo on top). I'm not much of one for textures or rendering - and this project was more about the model and the rig anyways.

Thoughts, anyone?
Besides the image I've posted here, my personal gallery site has some more shots of the completed version, as well as some WIP shots, under the sphereBug section.

Very cool! I like the chrome FX you have going on there! KUTGW!!

Sparticus

wow pretty sweet sphere bug you made, nice creation... howd you get the idea of making something like this?

Thanks!
As for the idea.... well, just transforming things in general. I have this one creature I want to make out of a cube.... but that's some time in the future. The bug actually started out as a different creature. I might ressurect it, though...