503 #3 Rust Bucket's Design

When designing Rust Bucket, I looked at various robot designs for inspiration, gathering them together into a moodboard with some light notes.

I kept it to canine/feline-esque structures as they waere always intended to be a pet, then narrowed it down to junkyard aesthetics, using scrap for material and keeping everything bare bones as their character origin is a robotic companion/guardian built using what little their creators could find.

I went over some design ideas, since the base structure was canid in nature, that was the easiest part. Since the Peace-Keeper had a sharper, more rigid design, I changed the base silhouette to a smoother, more streamline design, using more rounded edges and circular structures. 

Personally, I find the head to be the most important part, as Rust Bucket can't talk or make expressions, the head and movement will be doing all the work, so I went over a few different ideas for the head shape. 

The back legs were the easier part, although I tried a few different ideas for the front legs.

Once I had the basic shape structure, I went on to creating a more detailed design. I kept the first round greyscale to make sure the colours didn't blend together too bad. I wanted the legs to be different lengths, since Rust Bucket is a robot built from salvaged scrap, it would be hard to find everything exactly right, although I may drop the idea when I model to save on rigging and animation headaches.

Once I had that, I added some better colour differentiators, blue for wires and red for rust, mostly just to help with the lining/colouring of the design later.

I lined and coloured the turnaround with the final colour palette.

Next I started on a model sheet to show the extent of Rust Bucket's movement. A jump to show the extend of the hind leg stretches and a play pose to show how they would express themself.