LAZza 001 - A Food Delivery Drone

Here are my final renders. Changed all the blue panels to red. Because the blue serious expression eyes and blue panels may look too aggressive. So I add the opposite red colour to warm it up. 

This is my first contest. Quite enjoy the whole process and learned a lot from it. Look at so many talented artists all around the world sharing their work and passion here. I feel so motivated, will keep crafting my skills, make better work and participate in more upcoming events.

Special thanks to Peter Drew, who is the author of the pixel smile sticker. Thank him so much for allowing me to use this sticker in my work. Thanks to my lecturer Larry allowed me to use his nickname Lazza to have fun. Thanks to my 3D lecturer Tom, who comment "He just looks so damn determined to deliver hot meals on time!" when he first saw my render, and that is exactly what I try to present.

I also made two more images to show where my thoughts come from.

Basically, it started to get there, and then I kept refining it, adding a bit more details. Rendered 4k images as requested. I rendered them straight out of Substance Painter's R-ray renderer. The HDRI as the environment used in the results is exactly what I pictured in my mind :)

To add more Japanese tastes, I used Japanese words around the whole model. I used google translate and then using google fonts to find Japanese fonts. Then I screenshot the result and use photoshop to deal with them. Make them become alphas that I can paint in Substance Painter.

I use Japanese traditional blue and orange to decorate panels. For some metal parts, I picked a gold colour to give more contrast. 

During the texturing process, I always do some test renders to check out how it looks in real-world HDRI. Because I want him to look cute but not too "who killed rabbit roger". I hope in the final result he will look like lives in the real world.

The next stage is modelling and texturing. I use Maya as my main modelling tool. Photoshop and Crazy bump are used for customized grunge and normal map. Substance painter is the main texturing tool.

2. How to visualise this as a Japanese food delivery drone, not any other country and not a general parcel delivery droid?

In the beginning, I thought maybe I can make a sci-fi look lunch basket to represent the drone delivering food. Then I negated myself, it is not obvious enough, except I made a traditional look lunch basket.

Since I move the food to the robot's forehead and will make it like a helmet, the cover will be transparent for sure. So I don't need a basket. I decided to shift focus to food containers. A takeaway noodle box comes up with, it is very easy to recognise. To add more Japanese sense, I will put effort into textures, and maybe use some common Japanese patterns.

At this stage, the silhouette looks not interesting enough. And in order to add more elements to give the character more story and more connection to the world, I decided to add some commercially relevant elements. 

I added a taxi light on the top, and two advertisement flags. They help a lot to break the silhouette. The back flags actually could be a good element relevant to Japanese culture. Some samurai carry a flag on their back during the fighting.

The first all is set a brief. I saw the contest while I was having lunch in a Sushi Train restaurant. Then I thought to make a food delivery robot will be interesting.

So I set a brief to myself, making a cute Japanese food delivery robot.

Since I don't know much about Japanese culture, also don't have much knowledge of design. So my design process is more like an information collection and problem-solving process.

There are two questions among all, I found are the most difficult to solve.

1. Where does the droid carry or keep the food containers?

This is the basic function, and it will decide the whole structure. So I better figure this out first.

I did several drafts by placing food containers in different positions on the robot - back, top and bottom. At the same time, I found real drivers always wear a helmet. So I decide to place food on the forehead of the droid, making it look like a helmet structure.

I keep experimenting place random shapes to find an interesting silhouette. Finally, I choose to use a sphere shape as the premier shape because of its roundness.

Then I add a big headphone structure, which can break the silhouette and bring some proportion contrast.

After some research, I think the key to making something cute is promotion. Pixar's characters always have interesting body proportions.

I found a specific style that fits my design very well which is "chibi". So based on the chibi's proportion, I try to make my robot has a big forehead, and the position of the eyes is about the lower third. Then I quickly draw a draft and move to Maya. I built a great box, and turn off the lights to check out the 3D silhouette.