CRS-4 General Purpose Droid

As part of my efforts to re-design the world of Pale Black, one of the first major asset I dumped and rebuilt from scratch is the security droid. After some painful contemplation, I have decided that the previous version looked too...what's that word..."anime"-like. Sure it looked aggresive, but considering that it's purpose on the station was to protect the onboard population, I couldn't have it look as if it was going to rip out your spine whenever it was coming at you.

So, taking some pointers from real world robot designs, I came up with something more subdued and neutral. Something that wouldn't normally make babies cry but if looked at under the right light, could (hopefully) make your skin crawl.

I present to you, the CRS-4 General Purpose Droid.

As you can see, the station employs three variants that serves different roles. As with many major assets, I did a short writeup about the droid's characteristics to ensure continuity with the design and it's behaviour. I'll close this post with an excerpt from the writeup:

".....What the CRS-4 lacks in intelligence and durability, it makes it up with a relatively low startup cost and an even lower operating cost. The droid’s parts are designed as modules and can easily removed or re-attached in the field, even by untrained personnel. This reduces the need for dedicated technicians just for droid maintenance, as long as the operator maintain a healthy inventory of spare parts......"

Generic corridor

A typical sci-fi corridor, complete with fog and alarm lights. The big white square on the upper left corner is suppose to be a display screen. Still a WIP at the moment, though.

Storage room

New environment, a large, empty storage area. Nothing terribly interesting.

Security droid

One of the opposing robots the protagonist will encounter in the space station. Like most of the machines serving the (former) inhabitants of the station, the bi-pedal security droids have semi-independent AI that allows creative thinking, which makes them efficient enforcers and sometimes unpredictable.

Download 3D model - Turret

I made this model of a portable turret real quickly when I first had the (then very vague) idea for Pale Black, but now that I have the story and concept fleshed out a bit more, I couldn't find a place where I could use it.

So instead of letting it gather dust in my harddisk, I'm putting it up here for so that you could download it and maybe make better use of it. It is untextured, but the materials are already assigned properly.

Click here to download in LWO and OBJ format

Feel free to use it in your animations or stills. It'll also be great if you could show me what you've done with it. Just remember to credit this website in the image / video.

Enjoy!

Droid workshop and what the hell was I thinking

The droid workshop was the first environment I worked on. I finished the first version in one and a half day so I was pretty pleased with myself, confident that at this speed I could finish the first episode in no time. You can see the first version below:

Thankfully, I came to my senses quickly and realize that it looked like a POS. So I scrapped the whole thing and re-did it. The new workshop as it stands now looks like this:

I don't always have the luxury of sketching things out properly first, so sometimes my workflow involves haphazardly putting shapes together in my 3D modeler and hopes that it sticks. Fortunately, most of the time it works and the results look good enough. On the flipside, if it doesn't work out I would have wasted a lot of time.

So the lesson learnt here is: In the future, I will try to do more planning before before sinking my time in actual production of any assets, especially key objects and characters.

Here's to the one and a half days of my like I'm never getting back.

Guns and Grenades

The M161P Plasma Repeater Blaster and frag grenade. Putting holes and blowing up bad robots with the right amount of badass-ery and prejudice.

The great crates

What better to kickstart the production than making the ubiquitous crates and barrel that have became the hallmark of the sci-fi genre.

Yes, admittedly, progress is slow, but at least it is moving along.

To cap this post off, here's a humorous read about crates in video games.