The CrowBot progesses! An update.
This machine will be a character in the story of Ziggy. It is not intelligent itself in any way and should be seen as the ultimate remote controlled Swiss Army Knife drone. It will have a wide range of easily detachable tools available to use. Something like this would be invaluable in conflict zones or difficult to access sites.
It's taken more than two years to build so far and has been a very steep learning curve and demanded a lot from my obsession with getting things to work like I want them to. The CrowBot level of detail has to withstand close-up shots as Ziggy the spider will be interacting with it.
Everything is built from scratch, textured, animated and rendered entirely in Blender. No kitbashing!
Test animation of the head in action, with some detail close ups.
Update: Turntable of the wings folding and unfolding after much tweaking to iron out individual feather animation issues.
Wings and primary feathers attached. Folding process working well! Many drivers used! More feathers to come! Then flapping actions!
Tail done and working like I wanted! yay!
Testing out the look of how he moves. Somewhere between a real bird and a hi tech robot is what I was after. Happy with the result so far!
A collage of test animations of the hips during construction.
Self explanatory...