Robots with Lasers

Laser weapon wielding battle robot!

It's got a couple of tanks of liquid fuel around the torso, which is fed to a bunch of direct chemical to electrical energy fuel cells. The charge is then sent via a super conducting cable to the laser rifle, which has a stabilised emitter array and can laser-tattoo a cock and balls onto the face of an enemy soldier at a range of 15km, or burn a 5cm hole through his head, depending on the settings.

This guy was painted for the newly released book Nuthin but Mech from DSP, go buy a copy! It's filled with rad robots, from shit hot artists like Feng Zhu, Christian Pearce, Elliot Lilly, and nearly 40 others.

The laser weapon itself is a pulse or burn type, so it can be effective against soft and hard targets. The rear leg is servo driven so the gun can be placed on the ground or suitable surface, and controlled with the detachable interface. The high powered camera sight, in coordination with the stabilised beam emitter means that multiple targets can be tracked and targeted, and all destroyed with the push of a button. I wanted to design a 'functional' laser weapon, that uses the unique properties of beam weapons to its advantage, and looks like a laser, ie: a big cylinder.

Here's a quick illustration showing that bounty hunters assault vehicle as it would look travelling over rough terrain. The suspension is raised, the wheels have their tread blocks expanded, the crane arm is extended, and an inflatable storage compartment on the rear has been deployed.

Here's an ancient piece of District 9 design from way back in 2006. I was always kinda happy with this one. I think the brief at the time was for a powerfully built, bovine/herbivore feeling alien.

Lady Pilot

Lady Max

Here's a piece of personal work that I've been thinking about doing for ages, and the chance to put it in an upcoming as-yet-still-secret art book gave me a reason to get 'er done.

She's a bounty hunter or vehicular assault specialist, and her car is a rolling weapons platform with all terrain capabilities. What's that you say? 'Not with those wheels and that ground scraping front end!?' Well, those wheels are special! Apart from being mounted on highly articulated suspension arms, and independently driven with ultra-high-powered superconducting in-hub electric motors, they have a surface that contains spools of carbon nanotube fibers that unwind with centrifugal force to bond with the ground like a gecko's foot. The strands have a special molecular switch that continually sever the setae fibers as the wheel rotates so they generate huge amounts of grip but very little drag. They also have expandable tread blocks for old fashioned mechanical grip on rough off road surfaces. And the whole front end and body is articulated and able to raise right up for maximum ground clearance, and that's before we even get to the front mounted crane arm!

In the Field

AR-4 Huntsman equipped for the battle field.

AR-4 'Huntsman'

Autonomous robotic assault chassis. Liquid hydrocarbon powered with a direct chemical-to-electrical energy fuel cell behind the torso mounted ammunition box. Head mounted 15mm caseless autocannon firing double stacked 15x38mm armour piercing rounds. A lower mounted weapon fires specialty 15mm munitions. Rear mounted drum contains 1500 rounds of 30mm ammunition for the main weapon. The right arm is joined directly to the weapon with a forward sliding attachment point for one handed firing balance. The lower legs are protected by the flexible armour that would cover the whole unit when in the field. The armour has an active electrorheological layer that stiffens immediately under kinetic impact. But is otherwise highly flexible and relatively light. The feet are equipped with sensors to detect the surface and they, along with the environment calculations and movement processing from the CPU, decide whether to deploy either one or a combination of three traction methods. First is surface mechanical grip from the articulated toes and heels, followed by retractable pins that fire from the heels and have an articulated barb to anchor to the surface. There are also setae pads to generate intermolecular force with hard, relatively smooth surfaces. When this grip is combined with lightweight but rigid construction and an unloaded weight of 700kg, along with the prodigious output from the fuel cell, the unit can exert a huge amount of g-force and move with great speed and agility. Max burst speed is 200kmh with a sustained rate of 80kmh fully loaded. Total height of 3.2m

Just a couple of the awesome little guys I photographed on a trip through South East Asia.

friendly monsters

 These little guys were done ages ago, as an idea for vinyl toys of native New Zealand animals...

thomisus stoliczka

Your new desktop! I photographed this little crab spider by a beach in Ko Tao in 2004. If you like this you can check out the exhibition series it was in here, and some jumping spider pics here. Cheers!

Beck Kustoms

hey all!
when i'm not drawing robots, i can be found working on my '73 plymouth barracuda. check out my build blog if you like! BeckKustoms

Castle BrainSkull

Hammer Time

here's a close quarters weapon concept for the Devil Helix Viper. the blade is retractable into the handle, and the front of the weapon and the base of the handle have hardened striking surfaces. ammunition consists of double-stacked, electrically fired, caseless slugs. the attachment at the base of the handle is an articulated arm that connects to the wrist of the viper, steadying recoil, enhancing aim, and allowing the gun to swing out of the way if needed.

wrapped up

here's the clothed Devil-Helix Viper™

linear motor rifles

a.k.a: rail guns. a quick concept for a rail gun system. the upper is an anti-material or sniper type weapon, with two (of the same) batteries and a p90 style projectile magazine, it could also go full auto if the firer was a robot or modified human up for the recoil. the lower one is a cqb assault rifle/smg, with single battery and burst fire capacitor, and a standard style mag.

heavy weaponry

Devil Helix Viper

engineered-dna synthetic organic fighting unit. custom grown from tailored dna and outfitted when fully developed with nano-engineered mechanical augmentation. 20mm caseless cannon in head, with multifeed ammunition system. spider silk protein skin armour...

here's an older bit of concept design / production illustration, one of my first pieces at weta that required drawing an environment. that scared the shit out of me at the time, i hadn't really ever drawn anything with a 'background' and 'lighting' before...

more avatar stuff...

here's a few more old avatar designs

Avatar screen graphics

here's a little bit of the screen graphics i did for avatar. leri greer and i spent what seemed like months working on all the various screens. leri's a genius at this shit, you should see his stuff!

Moar AVATAR gunz

here's a couple more nerdy gun designs for avatar.

Avatar design: Mo'at

here's a radical departure for this blog...
concept art for the headdress Mo'at wears.
and unintentionally this nailed the look of the actual character according to jim.

AVATAR concept art

well, we here at weta have finally been cleared to show some of the design we did for avatar, a quaint little film you may remember, it came out last year and had blue hippy cat people in it. so over the next little while i'll be uploading some of my concept designs here.

this one was my first and really the only design we did for the cannon the amp suit carries. my thinking was that it's based around a 20mm aircraft weapon, that's been modified for use by the robotic humanoid AMP suit. hence the somewhat fabricated appearance and the big welded grab bars. this design was modified, according to jim's needs, to the final thing seen in the film.

2010 'Rumble in the Jungle' design.
this is a nationwide dnb mixing competition that, for the last 5 or 6 years, i've done the posters for.

www.rumblejungle.co.nz

repost!

done a few tweeks to this guy.
probably my favourite personal design of the last year or so...

AVATAR concept design

here's a little bit of the concept work i did for avatar.
these are weapon designs for the RDA security forces on pandora.
i really went super nerdy designing these things, and worked out all the little details, like the reloading process (pre-packaged plastic magazines that you tear the top off and load, complete with e-ink ammo counter on the sides. then you twist the top dial to chamber and cock the first round), how the modular pieces form various weapon types (the under barrel grenade launcher on the assault version forms the base of the shotgun/20mm munition launcher) etc etc etc good fun! these versions are the original caseless designs, but the finals in the film had cased munitions, and ejection ports, as jim wanted brass flying. he also asked for the shotgun to be pump action, which was fucking awesome cause pumping the final prop (with norinco 12 gauge pump internals) is a highlight of my time at weta.

another blog!

hey, in case anyone likes cars, or more specifically chrysler 'E' bodies, i have started a new blog!

http://ebodies.blogspot.com/

puku nui

a scribble of a happy dragon. i wanted to use all the colours.

a scribble from the last meeting i was in...

potential cover design for a personal book of drawings of 'red pencil' mecha.

i still draw with the col-erase red pencils that animators use, just seem nicer to me.

my scribbles with regular ol' graphite pencils are even more crap than these...

here's a link to some old-as red pencil mecha drawings

snake for a face!

was doodling a picture of a mean-as bat/owl/cat faced mecha, and thought it would make a nice cartoon guy...

here's the initial sketch

anatomy of a...

went a different direction with this guy... (or gal?)

synthetic self-evolved nano-engineered warrior mecha posing for an oil painting to go over his mantle piece...

quick render of a quick sketch...

most of the mecha/creatures i have on this blog are the product of putting pencil to paper with no idea of what i'm about to draw. i used to call it 'stream of consciousness mecha', but now i think it's probably just laziness. here's a perfect example. what is it? i don't really know... at least it only took 20 minutes

evil karate-master robot?
or robot with smashed plate for a face?
hmmmmm...

ThinkTank

here's some old ghost in the shell 'fanart'...
the section 6 think tank was always my favourite. see if you can guess why.

i do actually draw stuff that isn't robots you know.
honestly.
like cars, i draw pictures of cars too.
see, way different.