The making of Great Mazinger
Great Mazinger has been my fourth
creation. Exploiting all the experience developed during
my previous works, it took to me a fraction of the time spent in modeling, say,
Grendizer, to complete the whole job, also due to the relative simpleness of
the robot's lines. Once again, the most difficult part
to model has been the robot's head: especially what I call the
"crown" gave me not few troubles that I've solved barely satisfactory
after several trys with an intense use of spline/patch techniques.
A non trivial
challenge came just from the simplicity of the entire robot's structure: with
so few details and so elementary solids constituting the various part of the
body, eye's attention goes immediately to the ensemble so that setting up the
right proportions between arms, legs and torso become a crucial
issue. It's been the first time that I've been
compelled to use the stretch and resize tools with the whole figure assembled
on the background as a reference (very bad modelling habit!), selecting one
after one each distinct part of the body to set correctly its relative
dimensions. Besides, to avoid as much as possible a
dummy-like look, I've had to do many subtle refinements with shear, taper and
even pole tools to alter forearms, legs and thighs and free these objects from
their cold and disappointing cylindrical legacy.
Finally, let
me spend few words about the Bryan Condor (I suppose that's the correct
spelling): probably I've not been very rigorous in reproducing it (my
interpretation actually brings it closer to a jet airplane), but I hope that
the final outcome justifies the license. This object is
characterized by complex curvatures, showing surfaces joined together along
sharp corners and converging in cusps: its realization requested the
construction of a unique, single-piece spline cage and numberless attempts to
lay out the proper surfaces and, above all, to gauge the exact degree of
smoothness of each patch. With respect to the cartoon,
the major difficulty (unresolved after all, as you can notice) came from the
way the Bryan Condor is inserted into Great Mazinger's head: if you watch a
close-up of the original robot you can see that the vehicle is almost
completely merged into its head although the cockpit window still stands out
fairly; besides, the rudder is projected upward so greatly to resemble, in a
front view, a long vertical horn. I've found this
impossible to obtain without shifting back both cockpit and rudder up to
unacceptably twist the whole structure.
Excited by the work
done with Mazinger Z's Hover Pilder, I've once again unleashed my fantasy in
creating the internals of the Bryan Condor's cockpit: considering that, except
for some details of the handlebar, no scene has ever provided a complete
overview of the pilot station, I've felt free to invent at will.
Reminding the 90 degrees
rotation of the cockpit when the Bryan Condor locks into the robot's head, a
great amount of work has come from the necessity to make the spherical window ,
the cockpit shell and the vehicle central cross-section mutually compatible
(not forgetting the ultimate function of the cockpit, that is hosting a human
body provided with legs, head and so on!). Obviously,
the vehicle version used for distant shots is a "hollow" one, that is
the cockpit is not included.
