Designing the Armaments Migration System (AMS)
The Armaments Migration System was quite a fun mechanism to add to the Biomech. There is honestly so much I can say about what went into making it that this page probably won’t do it justice. The initial conceptualization of this idea goes way back to my high school years, to a time where I scribbled exosuits and gun designs on paper. Really the AMS is an audacious conglomeration of five different ideas:
Wing-like protrusions are just too cool on the back of a robot
An arsenal of weapons that are too big for bare hands so they must be held in the hands of exosuits
Having the huge weapons fold up into sections to store in a more compact manner
Shoulder-mounted weapons
Wrist-mounted weapons
The exosuit sketches I was making in my teenage years tended to feature two large swords mounted to their back, similar to the wings seen on Blue Iris. A downside with that design was if the pilot decided to draw one of the swords to fight with, the entire suit didn’t look nearly as awesome with one of the “wings” now missing from the back. Recalling the beautiful designs of the robots in the Transformers movies, I found myself attached to the silhouette of wing-like protrusions seen on characters like Bumblebee. My pencil-sketched suits eventually evolved into having permanent wing-like structures that could hold a sword and still retain that silhouette after the sword was drawn. But then I realized something else - these wings could hold guns in place of swords. And I thought, maybe I could design a whole arsenal of weapons that fit onto these wings.
The idea for wrist-mounting the weapons was next to materialize. The image honestly spawned into my mind from on high, of a small contraption on the suit’s elbow that grabs the weapon off the wing, and then swings the weapon onto the wrist. I decided that each armament would need a cylindrical protrusion for the “elbow clamp” to use as a hinge point, to perform the swing that attaches the weapon to the wrist. A small set of rails running along the wrist, which I referred to as the “arm rail”, would close around the roof of the weapon to lock it onto the robotic arm. The original elbow clamp idea looked quite different than what ended up being the final design; the first variant actually grabbed the gun’s hinge point from the sides like two jar lids covering the ends of a canister. After a great deal of testing, the design evolved into a claw-like mechanism that wrapped around said canister, as seen in the final cut.
Right around the time I was still sketching suit designs with swords attached to their back, I scribbled a rifle concept that I wanted to be the archetypal shape for the giant guns my suits would use. Upon closer inspection of my drawing, I realized the contours of the weapon would actually fold up quite nicely if I added two hinge points to the hull. The MT9, for instance, has one hinge point that folds the gun in two. When I scribbled this preliminary gun design years ago, I saw that adding two hinge points would fold the gun quite nicely in three. This was a kind of eureka moment for me, as I didn’t even intend to have the rifle fold when I drew it. And so I thought, what if all the weapons did this? Could each one fold in a different way?
In video game franchises like Halo and Gears of War, larger weapons get attached to the player’s back when not in use. However, there is no model for the mechanism that actually connects the weapon to the player’s back. One can assume that it’s just a big magnet, but then you run into the problem of foreign objects with magnetic attraction (if it was made in real life). There was also the issue of some weapons being rather long and phasing through walls, since they’d be an obnoxious protrusion if they retained collision physics on the player’s back. And in most cases, the weapons actually disappear when the player enters a vehicle. Pondering these artistic decisions, I opted for the all-out, nothing to hide route, by making the weapon-mounting method explicit. At this point in time, the plan was to have the Biomech’s wings store weapons in their folded position, only to unfold them when wrist-mounting or drawing them by hand. The concept of having weapons unfold while remaining mounted to the wing hadn’t been realized yet.
Cue another video game serious that has deeply inspired me - Armored Core. In these games, players assemble and pilot huge flying mechs that typically have giant weapons mounted to their shoulders. These shoulder weapons - while being unable to be handheld or mounted anywhere else on the mech - fold up when not in use while remaining mounted to the shoulder. It’s always fun to watch the animations of these weapons unfolding just before they fire. Recalling this feature, I thought, why not allow the Biomech wings to also have this ability? And so another weapons-ready position was discovered, alongside the options of having them handheld or wrist mounted:
As you can see from the images and clips throughout this page, I had to conduct tests to make sure every action was mechanically possible to animate without parts colliding, making small adjustments to the components as needed. Here for example, I found various ways for the Biomech to transfer a rifle from the wing to the hand:
And here I was testing if it was possible for a rifle to be transferred from the left wrist to the right hand. Though in The Briefing, we actually see the rifle transferring from the left wrist to the left hand:
Below is a mere snippet of the control scheme I developed to animate the AMS. For those who are animation-savvy, the entire AMS is rigged with an IK control system with space switching for up to 2 weapons and 10 magazines. Each weapon can switch between 12 spaces, and each mag can switch between 10. I might post more images about this in the future:
When I got around to modeling Blue Iris and some of the Biomech weapons, I didn’t have a plan yet for how ammunition would be managed. I knew there was plenty of space all over the suit to hold ammo, but now that the amount of weapon-mounting positions grew to six (3 on the left and 3 on the right), I had to sit down and think really hard about the best place to store magazines. At this point in time, I imagined all magazines would be loaded by hand, as is standard for modern weapons. Then I was hit with a eureka moment - the wing itself could also manipulate magazines, if it wasn’t currently holding a weapon. Just as each weapon would feature a set of standardized connection points to attach to the wings, the magazines of every weapon would have their own standardized connection points too. Now I just needed a location where magazines could be reached both by hand and by wing. After a little stand-up mime routine of me testing where my own hands could reach, I discovered the answer to be the lower back. Then another issue came to light - would the magazine always be in the correct orientation for reloading, when picked up by hand or by wing? The position I was most concerned about was AMS position 1 (shoulder mount) where the rifle flips upside down before being reloaded by hand, as seen in Part 3 of The Briefing. I figured it’d be a nuisance if the Biomech pilot had to somehow flip the magazine orientation in his hand before inserting it into the rifle, so I had to test if this would even be necessary. After using an empty mac-and-cheese box to act out the reloading sequences, I found that from the get-go, the mag was in the right orientation for all AMS positions.
There was another dilemma still at play. I was originally intending to have the weapons not be bullpup, in order to make them easier to fold. Just so we’re all on the same page, bullpup means the ammunition is chambered behind the trigger handle. This usually means the entire magazine is inserted behind the trigger handle, like the Tavor X95 or FAMAS. Here is why non-bullpup guns would be easier to fold into sections than bullpup guns: Bullpup designs have the barrel running through most of the gun’s hull, and, after some research, I came to conclude it’s a bad idea to design gun barrels that split into sections, no matter what clever engineering tricks you employ. If this were done in real life, you’d be asking for trouble as a gun smith. Even if you integrate a motor that screws the front half of a barrel onto its back half, it’s impossible to guarantee a flawless, straight and smooth pathway for the bullet as it fires through the barrel. A non-bullpup gun design (like the AR-15 or AK-47) would eliminate this worry altogether, since half the gun’s length doesn’t even have the barrel running through it, making it much easier to fold safely. In fact, there are some weapons already in existence that work just like this, such as the XAR Invicta. Anyhow, the dilemma kicked in when I tested how the wing would insert a new magazine into a wrist-mounted Folding Rifle A (which is not bullpup; see image on right). Unfortunately, there was no way to get this to work conveniently without lengthening the wing, which I avoided doing since it would ruin weight distribution when holding a heavy armament. If you recall in Part 3 of the Briefing, the wing uses a two-prong fork to pick up an MT9 magazine, which it loads into the gun in AMS position 2 (wrist mount). The only reason it can reach the insertion point (or magwell) so easily is because the MT9 is bullpup, which effectively keeps the magwell within the wing’s reach. The possibility of using the wings to reload mags was too cool to put on hold, so I had to rethink all my weapon designs to be bullpup. The difficulty now was that the folding mechanisms had to be made in a way where the gun barrel never splits. Seeing as bullpup rifle barrels run through most of the gun’s hull, I had to get clever with the folding mechanisms, as seen in the MT9 and will be seen in future weapon designs.
Image above: Unfinished Blue Iris model with an elongated Folding Rifle A imitating AMS position 2 (wrist mount). I say ‘imitating’ because I never modeled connection rails on the roof of Folding Rifle A, since the gun’s folding hinge protrudes and collides into the Biomech’s arm. Notice this weapon doesn’t have a bullpup design, which is problematic for when the wing tries to reach the magazine insert. The rifle seemed to always collide with the motors supporting the wing when I tested wrist-mounted reload sequences. Standard, non-bullpup hull designs like this might still be a possibility for future Biomech firearms, although it may be a while.
In some future animations, there will be two different weapons onboard the Biomech, meaning two different types of magazines onboard as well. At times the mags will need to be delivered to the opposite side from which they are stored; i.e., a mag from the left side will have to be delivered to the right side. This will be accomplished with the wings and the hands working in unison:
And in some cases, the magazines will be transferred between left and right sides via the wings alone. Don’t want to reveal too much on this yet but you may draw your own conclusions from the images below:
