I believe my robot sidekick is well designed and thought
out. I kept my design in line with the idea I’d drawn beforehand. My sidekick
goes well with the Second Life community and has been made with that in mind.
My planning for the assignment was good bout could have been
done a little better, I could have found more pictures of other robots to help
inspire me, which would in turn help me come up with more ideas both on my idea
map and overall design ideas. However I think the two ideas I created were both
up to a great standard. The amount of ideas that I displayed on my idea map
allowed for me to take different directions for each robot design I created. Having
only limited time, I chose to keep the ideas I had already come up with and
drawn and choose between them, to help speed things up so that I wouldn’t go
over the deadline.
I decided to model my second idea as it looked like it would
work better with the Second Life community, as that is part of the assignment
as a whole. Unfortunately this choice turned out to put me slightly over the
deadline as making this model took longer than expected. When I began the
production of the 3D model, I started with the shoulder, the reason for which
being that it is a simple sphere with a small hole bevelled into it, I then
continued to make the arm. This was a good choice as making the arm was quick
and simple, this is because the design uses mostly geometric shapes and I ended
up using the cylinder and sphere very often. However, some other shapes, like
the hands or the shins, were more difficult to model as the shapes were more complicated
and slowed the production process more than I expected they would.
To shorten the amount of time I would take to finish the
model; I only built half of the robot, then used the mirror tool to create the other
side of the robot, giving me the full and finished model that looks almost
exactly as I intended. This kept me from going way over the deadline for the
assignment and was a good idea.
The colours and textures I chose to give my robot, I think,
work really well with the design. Overall my final product is great,
considering my current experience with the program, but I could have managed my
time better and perhaps come up with more and possibly better designs.
