HA5 - Task 8

Sidekick Review

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.