The making of Gundam

    The structure of Gundam is a remarkable combination of geometric shapes and smooth, nearly organic, profiles: I had to use a lot of bevel, smshift, stretch and taper operations, while I've completely left aside tools like patch and metaform.     Surprisingly, the most difficult part of the body has been represented by legs, which absorbed nearly 60% of my efforts: in that case, I have successfully used the skin tool, together with raw and direct work on single points, by moving and dragging.
    The head has been obviously a very tough phase too; but it's been the first component I've modeled, so I couldn't take advantage of any specific experience on that kind of modeling.    I would like to be able to express an indicative estimation of the total hours I've spent working on the subject: watching the dates of the files, one could infer a period of nearly two months: yet taking into account the heavy lack of continuity and method of my work, it's definitely a lot of time.
    The Gundam saga could provide a large gallery of new subjects: I know that after the RX-78 protoype several descendants came along (Z-Gundam, Gundam X and so forth) but in general I can say that I didn't find particularly exciting both the subsequent robots designs and the stories (call me conservative!).

    A good source of inspiration could nevertheless come from Gundam's opponents: the brilliant idea to have a limited number of enemy mobile suit models fighting against Gundam (like, if you forgive the comparison, Spitfire versus Messerschmitt in WWII) brings a great range of choice for the 3D modeler.
    Considering its structure, Gundam is ideally suited for animation, for every joint has been carefully designed to accommodate almost all the correspondent movements of the human body: as an example, would be sufficient to take a look to the hips, made up of pivoting plaques that allow a wide range of rotations to legs.
    Unexpectedly a serious inconsistency pop out when I tried to make mutually compatible Gundam's waist, the transformed core fighter hosted inside it and a simplified human body used as a reference for the pilot's character.

     Differing a broader and more detailed discussion about the size of the hypothetical real life robots in a section expressly devoted to the matter, I can't help but mentioning that taking for good the "official" height of the robot, namely 18 meters, would imply the core fighter wholly deployed be approximately the size of a F1 racing car: the poor Amuro Rey (Gundam's most famous pilot) would be packed accordingly, surely being very far from having the plenty of room seen in the scenes of the cartoon.

    While in the case of the Great Mazinger I finally succeeded, despite after many trials, in creating a cockpit substantially compatible with respect to both aircraft operational situations (flight and robot driving), for Gundam I've found myself compelled to re-model a cockpit specific for the robot along with a brand new instrumentation: the having mixed images depicting the various phases of the robot build-up and the close-up of the pilot housing inside Gundam's waist is nothing less than an attempt to cheat the viewer (I'm guilty, I confess).