Designing Blue Iris
This page features progress work involving the design and animation of Biomech Blue Iris, for Part 1 of The Briefing. Part 1 shows how the pilot enters the suit and how the suit’s joints articulate, while the suit’s Armaments Migration System (AMS) is featured in The Briefing: Part 3. My design for Blue Iris is based on some crude pencil sketches of exosuits I scribbled in high school, years before I created The Briefing. I’ve always been obsessed with exosuits, however I’ve never come across one made in the style of my fantasies. Biomech Blue Iris is my take on powered exoskeleton design, and I hope to create many more Biomech designs for my sci-fi universe. This is actually my first rendered animation project ever, so I committed myself to learning as much as I could as I was making it. Most of my CGI knowledge comes from YouTube, but some vital skills and fundamentals come from the Gnomon Workshop, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to get serious with CGI.
In the gallery below, I show how I began with a basic block-out of the silhouette I was going for, proceeded by a paint-over conceptualizing the detailed parts. The process of translating the 2D concept into a 3D model was going quite well, or so I thought.
At this stage I hit a massive roadblock. I was intending to have the motion of the joints look more realistic by inserting linear actuators underneath all the panels of the suit, but I didn’t draw these actuators in my concept art. The problem I faced was that the panels were too close to the human skin, so there was barely any room for reasonably-sized actuators to fit in the voids. They would’ve ended up being so small that they’d never extend far enough to actually achieve a decent range of motion. I saw that if I was going to make them big enough, I would have to start with designing the actuator network before designing the paneling. After some thought I realized it’d be best to model the actuators in 3D space right away instead of first painting a 2D concept. Had I done it in 2D first, I would certainly have run into unexpected motion limitations when I translating into 3D. Starting immediately in 3D allowed me to test the range of motion intermittently and make adjustments to the actuators accordingly. In short, I had to actually engineer this thing, which entailed hours upon hours of guesswork and testing to see if the actuators were arranged properly. Each actuator had to have the right endpoint location for both ends. The thickness of both the smaller and larger cylinders had to feel realistic; too thin would look weak, and too thick would collide with other parts. The maximum length when extended and minimum length when contracted had to bear enough clearance for the smaller cylinder to remain secure in the larger cylinder, without it coming too close to sliding out or letting the cylinders collide internally. This process required me to redo almost the entire body design shown above.
