Submersible Mech

I always wanted to create a very functional Nasa inspired design. I had a great opportunity to do a Gnomon workshop on Sept. 29th and decided to build a Nasa Submersible Robotic Probe.

Imagining a scenario where the space exploration keeps going in an accelerated rate and in the future human kind could land on Jupiter's moon Europa. Many scientists believe Europa contains liquid water under the thick ice layer. The Nautillus probe is designed to be deployed on the freezing water and explore the depth of the moon ocean after another probe deploys a highly advanced drill to go through almost 1 mile of ice (I'm planning on design that as well):

In order to stabilize itself for more precise exploration, the Nautillus is able to deploy legs that have pistons to drill into surfaces:

 In order to perform the explorations, Nautllis have an advanced mini-lab attached to his left arm:

To share some of my workflow, I will briefly describe how apporached the creation of this design:

I started with some quick sketches on paper then moved to 3d for some blockouts. I was able to figure out the overall proportions and experiment with the whole mech transformation:

After this I did a quick paint over to help establish the overall frequency and scale of details. As soon i was done with the paint over I started the modeling part:

This early versions had a more simplistic arm. After some research I decided to use a more realistic design based on real submersible arms:

Shaded render of the final model:

I hope you like this. It was definitely a lot of fun and great practice of fast modeling techniques.

-Fausto.