For the drones I did some visual research on military drones, package delivery drones and quadcopters. I then concluded that the design of my drones should be a mixture of all 3 to make for an interesting look. 

I created 2 different drones for the movie, a friendly looking one that is merely a messenger, so it flies around and delivers hologram messages, and a patrolling ‘mean’ looking drone, to enforce the feeling that technology is invading our privacy in the movie’s world. I built the drones by extruding a cube and adding one more cube to its side to built a wing.

I built several different shapes until I found one that I was satisfied with. I then cut the drone in half and mirrored everything with the mirror modifier to ensure that the drones are symmetrical. The Drones main shapes are very simple as I again wanted to leave the biggest job to texturing. I used a boolean operation on the drones to create the wholes needed to place the rotors in.

I built the rotors by joining a mesh that I multiplied by using an array modifier with a basic cylinder. These meshes are rotor blades, that I created by scaling a cube and applying a subsurface modifier on it.

I tried to built different bottom pieces for the drones to land on, until Jacob suggested to not have any, because these drones would not land. Since I did not like the idea of having drones that have nothing on the bottom, I added 3 hatches through texture later on. The idea is that the tires or legs are retracted into the body of the drone while flying, similar to planes’ tire systems.

The white drone has been decorated with green stripes, which makes it visually more interesting. It’s rounded off shape combined with the bright and friendly colours give this drone its friendly look. White generally stands for peace, goodness and hope, green stands for life, growth and safety. I used a colour theory wheel that the Mill posted on twitter to determine the drones’ colours.

The black drone has sharper edges and its dark appearance makes it look mean and dangerous. Black is intimidating, and stands for evil, death, mystery and power, which therefore was a good choice for a patrolling drone.

I didn’t have the time to make all my alphas myself, but I did make 1 alpha plate myself. One of the chinese warning signs was a normal sign that I found on google. I put it into photoshop, set the files colour settings to grey scale and made sure to only have black and white and not too many shades of grey in the file.

I added some imperfections to it, exported it as a tiff, imported it into Substance Painter and then used it on the black drone. I also downloaded a very useful alpha brushes pack which I used to create the hatches and the vents on both drones. Below you can see 2 texture test videos I made to see how the texture reacts to light and to show my progress to the team and get feedback on it.