How to Build a Virtual Robot

For anyone who has a website, or makes animated videos for YouTube.com, being able to make your own quirky virtual characters is a tremendous plus. This tutorial will show you how to model your own basic virtual robot in Hexagon, but any modeling program should do. When complete, you can take your virtual robot to a program like Poser or Carrara for rigging.

Things You'll Need

• Hexagon or alternate modeling program

Instructions

1. 

   In Hexagon, click on the Primitives tab. Click on the cylinder, then draw a cylinder in the scene. Rotate the cylinder on the Y-axis 24 degrees, and make sure its X and Z positions read 0.

2. 

   Change the selection tool to Faces. Select some polygons on the "chest". Go to the Vertex Modeling tab and click on the Extrude Surface tool. Go to the Properties panel, and use variations of this tool, including Insert, to create the simple "chest panel" shown.

3. 

   Create a second, smaller cylinder. Position this cylinder where it can serve as the "hip". If the size isn't right, use the scaling function of the Universal Manipulator tool to scale it larger or smaller by dragging the little yellow cube.

4. 

   Use the cylinders and spheres on the Primitives tab, the Universal Manipulator, and the Extrude Tool to create the arms and hands. Once you create the parts on one side, copy, paste and use the Move function on the Universal Manipulator to copy the hand and arm on the other side.

5. 

   Create a cylinder for the head, using the Extrude tools. Use the Universal Manipulator to create the eyes and mouth. Select the outer edges of the eyes and drag them forward to make the eyes flat. Add a thin cylinder to act as the neck. Finally, create a sphere from the Primitives tab, and place it as shown to serve as the roller for the robot. You can now save, and export the robot to another program as a Wavefront OBJ file.