BB-8 development

[savagecreature]

Okay, it's true. I was impressed with BB-8 when I saw him roll out on stage at Celebration. Guess we'd better get building.

Gotta have plans to build a droid, though, so I thought I'd get to work on those first.  I'll document my process to allow for double checking accuracy.  If people see errors or flaws, please let me know and I'll see what I can do about correcting them.

I started out by taking the footage from the reveal and saving it out as an image sequence. This yielded 3779 frames. About 600 of these were of people talking or reactions from the audience, so I went through and deleted those. They were entertaining, but they're not going to help me build a droid. 

I went through and found a frame that looked like a good candidate and cropped the image down to just what I needed for the droid.





I created a sphere in my 3D weapon of choice and masked off the areas between the panels. Then I took the image I had cropped and projected it on to the sphere keeping an eye on the orientation.





I carefully went through the frames identifying each unique round panel and projecting them onto the sphere, making sure to get the orientation right as well as it's relative position to all the other panels. When I was done, I had this:




The point here isn't to have high quality versions of the panels on the sphere, but to map out the location and orientation quickly and easily so that it can be verified and used as a reference as more detail is refined.

[Toby]

I found some clear pictures of BB-8 at StarWars-Union.de (from the Force Awakens Exhibition in Anaheim):
http://www.starwars-union.de/nachrichten...sstellung/

[Conqueror_Worm]

More reference images:
http://www.rebelscum.com/2015-Celebratio...efault.asp
The patent (20140345957):
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=paten...345957.pdf

[kresty]

All of the "sides" are different, just to make things interesting. I'm busy uploading photos on this horrid hotel internet connection. If that fails, I'll send them to savage.

[Toby]

Herr is the patent for BB-8:
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20140345957

[kresty]

I noticed that the side panel door things, ports, whatever they are, are not all in the same orientation WRT each other.

On the exhibition model 4 of them point (the orange ticks) between the other doors (or close to that anyway). The top and bottom however point toward the other doors. (so they're 45 degrees apart from the others). I didn't look at the on-stage or animated versions enough to tell if they have the same orientation.

Of course if it's like a screw door or something, the orientation may shift...