howdy! I'm also a robot enthusiast and I'm trying to get better at designing robot characters. I absolutely adore all of your robot designs, especially the sweet salt cosmonauts! do you have any advice for designing robots?
The biggest advice I can give is to study the functionality! That’s the most interesting part of robots to me, and influences all my designs. You definitely don’t have to understand the mechanics completely, but getting an idea of the basics, and knowing what the function and purpose of the robot is, and what parts help to carry out that function, is always a good starting place!
Here’s an example of how I was mostly focused on the saw mechanics of the shoulder, because that’s what was important to the story, and made the rest mostly aesthetic driven.
Whereas with Thylo, I had an idea of how I wanted his legs to look, and built the mechanics around that, to serve the aesthetic, but it also plays into his motion, and how he stands, and his balance.
For Snap, both her new and older designs are more personality driven, and wanted to keep her more ‘human’ elements more round and approachable, and her mechanical parts sharper, to sell that they’re weaponry, and that she’s both kind and a fighter. But even her sharp aspects are never perfectly straight, keeping it fun and light-hearted.
Her’s is also a transforming design, and every little piece serves that function, especially the head area, and I consider how the panels will fall or open, or attach. Again, it doesn’t have to be mechanically accurate, but if you’ve got a solid idea of how the physics work for the character, it really sells the design!
Even for less humanish designs, you can give a clear idea of the robot’s function through decals, or how it affects the environment/other characters.
Here’s a little example: let’s say I wanna make a robot whose purpose is to lift boxes on top-shelves, and bring them down to a pallet. It would need a way to see the box, a way to reach it, and to push it onto the pallet.
So, I’ll play with the idea of his functionality first. I could go with some sort of scissor lift, or hydraulic system, but I settle on mostly a telescoping mechanism, and build a little warehouse, or dock worker aesthetic around him.
In short, I’d say just study mechanism that interest you, play with their shapes, their motion, figure out the purpose or character of your robot, and how they function, and what ways you can best convey that through their design! Hope this helps! ✨