Refining the shape of the Robo Samurai upper body...


As mentioned at the end of the last post, I'm getting to a point where I'm constantly thinking of new ideas and adjustments and although I intended to move on and design the arms etc something about the upper body still wasn't quite right. The abdomen was looking quite plain so I thought it might be cool to try adding some more blades seeing as this is a running theme throughout this design...


This added more interest to the area but I still wasn't sure about the bulky shape. I'd considered  widening the top part of the pelvis to match the bottom of the stomach area but it was still too square and blocky, from the start I'd wanted to use more triangular shapes and diagonal lines where possible and this led to the decision to try reshaping the front of the upper body. Here is the first attempt...


This worked from a front view but from the side and three quarter it still looked square so I decided to go one step further and cut away the bottom section at an angle as well....


This was far more dynamic and worked with the lower body better as well, I still plan to iterate on the lower half but for now this was good progress. Next I thought I'd once again try adding the blades, this was the result...


Pretty cool. Although it's a bit messy and I'm going to redraw a tidier version for the final design, I'm very pleased with this. The blades run off the sides towards the back like the ones on the helmet and the armour either side of the wheel. You could literally keep iterating and tweaking things forever so there needs to come a time when you make the decision to stop, I'm almost there but from this particular view I still wanted to adjust a couple of things. First of all I went back to the helmet/head again and changed the shape of the three blades at the bottom of the helmet... 


I also thought it would be more in keeping with the angular nature of the design if I flattened the curve of the shoulder pads slightly and increased the size of the blades...


This is starting to really take shape now, next I'm going to move onto the design of the arms, hands and swords.


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