Alexandre Ferra Design

Robot Valeo

Robot design for a Ad of the Valeo brand.

CLIENT Backlight Studio

YEAR 2015

Backlight studio asked me to create a robot for the Valeo brand, an automotive supplier. They supplied us a lot of their 3D pieces, being that, this project became a kitbash project with real car parts.
It was an awesome occasion to learn about automotive engineering, to understand the functionalities of the pieces and their design. The interior of the robot is made at almost 80% with this “real” kitbash. So my work was to assemble the pieces together to give life to a robot.

In addition I had also to create pieces to get better transition between the different parts, or create his skeleton. Like the frame of the torso, it contribute to give him life, some pieces where also created to allow him to move.

I also worked with Aymeric Favre, he made an early version of the robot assembly, fingers and the head of the robot. We worked together to give it as much movement freedom as possible.

Robot Design

The Valeo identity is green and white, I took inspiration from racing car and supercar like Porsche and Lamborghini. Details at every scale and the angular shapes are perfect to bring a sportive spirit to the robot. For example we can have a look at the interior of the belly like on the supercars to directly look at the engine.

Robot Frame

The interior is made at 80% from the kitbash of the official Valeo mechanic pieces. For this reason I decided to focus on the assembly of those different parts and organs to obtain something realistic. Then I also added some missing parts, mostly for the joints ands articulations. Finally I partially created a skeleton around the arms, legs and torso.
The final pass was to add wires, I added them like veins, with the same logic for the wires of the belly to get something like entrails, with a lot of layers of wires and different radius scales.
The design of the whole robot is the translation of real human anatomy parts into existing mechanics pieces.