Feathered Dinobot (Beast Wars: Transformers Fan Animation)

Let the chants of LIZERD NOT BURD begin. Dinobot had one of the most cheatsy and blatantly unfeasible transformations in Beast Wars, and I wanted to see if it can be updated, along with modernizing his old-ass Jurassic Park-inspired dinosaur mode. It turned out to way too tricky, and I left this model unfinished for about 4 years, but now I thought I’d try my hand at it again. The feathers were the first major hurdle. I can’t do hair simulation, and the feathers kept clipping through each other if I modeled them separately, so I just used the old-fashioned method of painting feather textures on the body and doing the rest via planes and feather textures with transparent outlines. The end effect isn’t too realistic, but at least it’s functional. The transformation is of course still full of cheats, but at least now all the dinosaur parts have somewhere to go. The beast mode is its own model with its own armature, and the robot mode is controlled by three other rigs within a separate armature (segmented beast, segmented robot, full robot), containing a total of 422 animation bones, plus there’s an extra armature performing other functions that didn’t fit into the others, bringing up the total number of bones to 537. The robot mode is barely workable and only looks decent from a few angles. Structurally, it’s hollow, frail and parts of it are just floating attached to nothing. It’s messy, fiddly and trying to animate it makes your head turn inside out as well, which is why I guess none of the actual Transformers shows use models like this for their animation. But at least I can say I did it, sort of. Transformers, Beast Wars and Dinobot belong to Hasbro. Voice samples, featuring the almighty Scott McNeil, music and some sound effects were taken from the show and its DVD extras. The raptor’s proportions were based on skeletal drawings by Scott Hartman (at least I think, it was a long time ago), and tweaked to accommodate the inner robot bits.