Vehicle and Prop Design - Project 1: Pre Production

26.09.2024 - 28.11.2024 / Week 01 - Week 08
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Vehicle and Prop Design / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Project 01 - Pre Production

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INSTRUCTIONS

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PRACTICAL

For project 1 of Vehicle and Prop Design, we had to come up with a basic vehicle design that could be either land, sea, or air based. In our proposal we had to propose ideas for all three vehicles as well as prop proposals for what we were going to design.

I compiled what I found interesting and was interesting in drawing and presented it to my lecturer in my first proposal. For my land vehicle, I wanted to do a hoverbike because I thought they were really cool and there's a lot of potential for the shape and design of them. For the sea vehicle, I wanted to design an underwater crab mech that would be used for underwater construction and scavenging and for the air vehicle I wanted to design a spacecraft that was a mixture of stealth drone and fighter jet. My prop ideas were to design either a futuristic handgun or a lever action since I felt that those would be interesting props to design on my own. After some feedback, I decided to change my idea and focus on one vehicle type and a different prop.

I decided to stick to land vehicles and decided to create a crab-like tank, I would sorely regret this decision in the future and hate myself for choosing this however I didn't think of this at the time because a crab tank was something I found cool. As for the prop it would have been a crab gauntlet that the pilot would wear to steer the vehicle.

Figure 1.1: Crab Mechanization Test

At first, I tried using actual crabs as the base for the mech by outlining them and turning them mechanical however I quickly realized that this was a stupid idea and it looked terrible so I went to blender and created a generic blockout for the design.

Figure 1.2: Blender Screenshot

Figure 1.3: Crab Mech Shape

After finishing a basic blockout on blender, I took a screenshot and used it as my base to design to draw the crab mech.

Figure 1.4: Vehicle Tests

After finishing the 1st design, I tried experimenting and designing a second design that was more tank-like with treads instead of feet. 

Figure 1.5: Updated Test

After some feedback, I decided to make it more catered towards warfare by adding a giant twin-barrel cannon on the roof. I also experimented with machine gun arms and shields instead of claws. 

Figure 1.6: Vehicle Design

I decided to remove the claws and added the shields but designed them in a way to make them look somewhat claw shaped by having them curve inwards. I also added on guns to the side of the tank for more details and used iconography and colours from Warhammer 40,000 to fill out the rest of the design. I also made the claws a lot sharper since the basic flat look wasn't good enough.

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REFLECTION

I really struggled with this module, not knowing anatomy is one thing but not knowing vehicle anatomy is a whole other issue that I struggled with. I've never been strongly versed with vehicles at all so trying to design one that looked good was tough for me. I really wish I stood with the motorbike idea as that would have been a lot easier for me to handle as it would have required a lot less work and ideation.