Outer Shell Design and Refinement

This week, I moved on to designing and refining the robot’s outer shell. In the early stages, I used simple planes to block out the shell as a rough sketch — this approach made it easier to adjust and already conveyed around 60% of the final design, providing a helpful preview.

I carried out most of this workflow in Blender, as mesh-based modeling is more flexible for this phase compared to a CAD-style approach.

The outer shell design was primarily based on my earlier sketches, aiming to align closely with the internal skeleton. This helped avoid issues with proportions later on, such as parts appearing overly bulky or disconnected from the internal structure.

The next step was to add thickness and detailed elements to the outer shell. This process helped further enrich the design and give it a more mechanical, grounded feel. I referred to a variety of industrial components and incorporated some of those design elements into my own model.

With this, the outer shell design was mostly finalized.

Reflection

Although this week’s focus was still on hard surface design, the outer shell and the internal details followed different approaches. The details on the outer shell were developed more along the flow of surface lines, which helps make the design look more natural and visually appealing.