Concept: For my concept, I knew I wanted something robotic but, I wasn't sure the exact direction. While looking through a few different ideas, I stumbled upon some Iron Giant pictures and thought it would be the perfect child's prosthetic.
In the film, the Iron Giant gets upset when threatened and turns his arm into a weapon, I decided to keep the transformation portion, but instead of it being a weapon it would just be a child's toy that lights up and makes sound on command. This is also an addition I wanted to make as I knew, from a modeling perspective, it would be easier as much of the prosthetic is composed of primitive/simple shapes
I had considered other things such as an Iron Man arm, but I really wanted something unique that would stand out in an understated way. I started with a simple sketch to layout the design and took it into Photoshop to get exact measurements for easy to reference orthographic views.
Modeling: I created a hexagon using the line tool, duplicated twice for each edge of the body. I scaled these appropriately to my drawing, and then created vertical lines to denote the vertical elements. Using these as a foundation. I created a closed surface with the components. I duplicated the solid and scaled it to be slightly smaller and created a cylinder to use with boolean difference to hollow out the center. I created a truncated cone for the bottom of the body that use a similar process to hollow out and used boolean union to combine the pieces. For the center pipes, I simply created cylinders and hollowed them out where necessary. I the filleted the edges to give a smooth finish
The hand cover and fingers were modeled in Maya. I used the create polygon tool to shape the hand cover, and extruded to fit my specifications. For the fingers, I modeled a full finger by creating a cylinder of about 12 subdivisions and adjusted vertices with soft select to get the desired shape. I selected a ring of faces around each of the joints and deleted them to create the separations. I closed the created holes by extruding each ring that was created and merging the new vertices to the center. I created some edgeloops to support the new caps and used the smooth tool to work out any kinks. I created a pipe for the knuckle covers, cut it in half by deleting out the bottom faces and appended the holes using the append polygon tool, I shaped them using soft select and the scale tool to fit around the finger sections.
After fitting and positioning the finger how I desired, I duplicated and made slight adjustments for the rest of the fingers. I did a similar process for the thumb, simply with one less joint. For the palm I created a box and added some topology to give me some sculpting room. I adjust the vertices using soft select to give the impression of a cushiony palm. After finishing, I double checked for supporting edgeloops and that all of my models smoothed correctly
Materials: I used a shiny metal for the majority of the parts, a medium grey for the larger pieces and a white grey for the detail pieces. the palm is a matte light grey to create a synthetic fabric look, I didn't want it to be shiny like the other pieces because I wanted it to be similar to that of a human hand that could really grab and hold on to something.
Changes from original design: I made some adjustment while modeling that created some variance between the 3d model and drawing. For the hand, I made it much more organic looking, I wanted it to be able to grab and hold something like a human hand does. I also wanted to add some humanity to the piece, as it would be a prosthetic for an individual to wear. The fingers are inspired by the Iron Giant and my drawing, but really took their own form as I sculpted them out, really contrasting the rest of the model.
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