Joint Research

When creating any type of character, one would need to think of movement. For a person to be able to move, they have different types of joints in the body, so I did some research into what I would need for my robot. I found a good reference picture on the internet depicting various types of joints and their points in the body.

Now, as my robot only has legs, I only need a hip, knee and ankle joint. The hip would be a ball and socket joint, and the knee and ankle would both be saddle joints. Now that I knew this, I took to maya to practise creating these.

I started with some basic shapes and molded them into the correct shapes for the joints I was creating, Firstly the saddle joint as it is very simple to make and animate.

After creating this I moved onto creating and animating a ball and socket joint, which required some different shapes and tools to be created than the more simple saddle joint.

Doing this really helped me to understand the joints which I would need to use for my model and how to make them unaided.