The making of Jeeg
I couldn't explain the attraction I feel for this objectively clumsy
and naive creation of Japanese cartoonists: yet, I would include Jeeg in the
top five of my favorite ones. Probably it's the ease of drawing it on one hand
and the fact that, years and years ago, it was one of the earliest and more
frequently broadcasted by a local TV network on the other, that caused to me a
sort of "imprinting": what I can say about Jeeg is that surely I've
modeled it once with colored plasticine and that it's been only one I could
study with attention, in an age where VCR didn't nearly exist, thanks to
stickers featuring frames taken directly from the TV series that I used to buy
in newsstands.
Since you could hardly find one straight line along Jeeg's body, I have almost
exclusively used patch modeling, starting with a low polygon division and then
metaforming once (rarely twice) to add a further degree of smoothness. I didn't
need any model (excepting a picture I've found in a magazine) to perform the
job: I used to draw it so many times when I was a kid that I have learned by
heart almost all the details.
A curiosity: the yellow grooves running along the top of the head deserve a special mention
for their correct realization literally drove me crazy, making me waste a lot
of time: to reproduce (with boolean subtraction) this after all secondary
detail, I've been compelled to push the polygonalisation quite heavily (and to
apply tripling, therefore raising sensitively the total count of polygons) and
to try tens and tens of adjustments: despite the actual outcome is still very
far from perfection , as you can probably notice, I've had definitely enough
and I don't think I'll work on it anymore.
Due to the
simpleness of the basic idea of the structure, Jeeg is particularly suitable
for animation: no inconsistencies or odd behaviors emerged when I've found
myself articulating the various parts of the body in the Layout: you can put
the same constraints for head, bank and pitch rotations than for a human body
and still obtain convincing poses. Besides, the relative poorness of details
makes this particular robot eligible to produce various versions at different
levels of polygonalisations, allowing to choose the optimum model in relation
to the type of rendering/shooting.
