Transformer toy design limits
One thing about any art is that part of the delight of creation comes from the limitations of the medium. If you can do literally anything, perfectly and immediately, the creative process is short-circuited and there's little sense of accomplishment or satisfaction.
This is why people build enormous structures out of toothpicks, write full applications in machine code, and spend decades adding to and tweaking their creations.
I've found that one of the media I like to work in is plastic, or at least theoretical plastic. Designs which could be physically rendered in plastic, anyway. Specifically, ABS plastic for the most part, and pretty much limited to the plastics used in the retail versions of what I build in my head.
There are a lot of limitations to make the process interesting.
There are material limitations. You can't make a part too thin, or it'll have manufacturing and handling problems. Moreso if it's a structural component. You can't make a part too large, or it'll be heavy, cumbersome, and use up expensive materials to make. You can't make a part which has to bend too much, or it'll snap - or at least develop flaws in the plastic.
There are dimensional limitations. There are a lot of moving parts in these toys. They each have to fit together in multiple ways. They can't overlap. They can't pass through one another on the way from A to B, like a CGI object could.
There are manufacturing limitations. Sometimes, you need a rod, or screw, or glue, to hold one part to another. Room for those things has to be designed in. Parts can't be so large they don't fit in the manufacturing volume. Detail work may be limited. Paint or plastic colour, and its complexity in application, and its cost, all have to be looked at. LEGO blocks have a manufacturing tolerance of no more than five microns in order to be able to connect to each other firmly yet temporarily. Near enough is not always good enough.
There are limits of tradition. While the official commercial product has a LOT of variation, any imitative design still has to look more like something from that set of toylines than almost any other set of robot toylines on the planet. It can't look too much like Gundam, for example. And yet, in many cases it has to look like something recognisable - a car, a truck, a plane, a tyrannosaur. It can't look like a random wad of plastic. There has to be at least some form of what the industry calls 'play value'.
And then there are the personal design preferences. Oh, so many of them. Things I design can't be too simple. But at the same time, they must be as simple as possible, for maximum elegance and ease of manufacture. They can't, if at all possible, display any of several design elements I deem artistic flaws, even if those same elements appear in commercial toys. Visible heads, faces, hands, and other robot parts. Altmodes which look like a crunched-up robot. Altmodes which are visibly deformed from what might be expected purely in order to fit a robot inside. Excess kibble. Lack of basic articulation. Shellforming. Partsforming. Robot modes which don't look integrated. Obviously hollow limbs. Weak joints. Accessories with nowhere to be stored in one or more forms. Weaponry which looks like it's built out of leftover kibble. Detachable parts which make the toy look much less integrated or impressive if they're lost.
The complexity, particularly, is an issue to be carefully balanced. It's why I don't like most of the designs from the multi-decade robot design powerhouse Plex International Design (now part of Bandai Namco), who were responsible for Gobots, Power Rangers and Kamen Rider mecha, and pretty much half of the giant mecha to come out of Japanese TV since the 70s. In my mind, they're far, far too simplistic. Their idea of transformation is to have a robot lie down and attach a bunch of parts to it (or have those parts hinge into place from where they were awkwardly sticking out of the robot previously). The transformations feel like they were designed by preschoolers.
I realise Plex's goals are different from those of the Hasbro and Takara/Tomy design teams. Plex is looking for designs which can be worn onscreen as giant robo suits, some of the time, or which can be stamped out in factories using only a couple of parts, or which fit into preconceived aspects of a TV show. My own preferences, however, are for the robot to look like an actual robot, the altmode to look like its own vehicle and not a robot taking a nap, and for there to be a satisfaction to the transformation process - a sense that something has actually been accomplished. Plex designs don't do that for me.
This is why people build enormous structures out of toothpicks, write full applications in machine code, and spend decades adding to and tweaking their creations.
I've found that one of the media I like to work in is plastic, or at least theoretical plastic. Designs which could be physically rendered in plastic, anyway. Specifically, ABS plastic for the most part, and pretty much limited to the plastics used in the retail versions of what I build in my head.
There are a lot of limitations to make the process interesting.
There are material limitations. You can't make a part too thin, or it'll have manufacturing and handling problems. Moreso if it's a structural component. You can't make a part too large, or it'll be heavy, cumbersome, and use up expensive materials to make. You can't make a part which has to bend too much, or it'll snap - or at least develop flaws in the plastic.
There are dimensional limitations. There are a lot of moving parts in these toys. They each have to fit together in multiple ways. They can't overlap. They can't pass through one another on the way from A to B, like a CGI object could.
There are manufacturing limitations. Sometimes, you need a rod, or screw, or glue, to hold one part to another. Room for those things has to be designed in. Parts can't be so large they don't fit in the manufacturing volume. Detail work may be limited. Paint or plastic colour, and its complexity in application, and its cost, all have to be looked at. LEGO blocks have a manufacturing tolerance of no more than five microns in order to be able to connect to each other firmly yet temporarily. Near enough is not always good enough.
There are limits of tradition. While the official commercial product has a LOT of variation, any imitative design still has to look more like something from that set of toylines than almost any other set of robot toylines on the planet. It can't look too much like Gundam, for example. And yet, in many cases it has to look like something recognisable - a car, a truck, a plane, a tyrannosaur. It can't look like a random wad of plastic. There has to be at least some form of what the industry calls 'play value'.
And then there are the personal design preferences. Oh, so many of them. Things I design can't be too simple. But at the same time, they must be as simple as possible, for maximum elegance and ease of manufacture. They can't, if at all possible, display any of several design elements I deem artistic flaws, even if those same elements appear in commercial toys. Visible heads, faces, hands, and other robot parts. Altmodes which look like a crunched-up robot. Altmodes which are visibly deformed from what might be expected purely in order to fit a robot inside. Excess kibble. Lack of basic articulation. Shellforming. Partsforming. Robot modes which don't look integrated. Obviously hollow limbs. Weak joints. Accessories with nowhere to be stored in one or more forms. Weaponry which looks like it's built out of leftover kibble. Detachable parts which make the toy look much less integrated or impressive if they're lost.
The complexity, particularly, is an issue to be carefully balanced. It's why I don't like most of the designs from the multi-decade robot design powerhouse Plex International Design (now part of Bandai Namco), who were responsible for Gobots, Power Rangers and Kamen Rider mecha, and pretty much half of the giant mecha to come out of Japanese TV since the 70s. In my mind, they're far, far too simplistic. Their idea of transformation is to have a robot lie down and attach a bunch of parts to it (or have those parts hinge into place from where they were awkwardly sticking out of the robot previously). The transformations feel like they were designed by preschoolers.
I realise Plex's goals are different from those of the Hasbro and Takara/Tomy design teams. Plex is looking for designs which can be worn onscreen as giant robo suits, some of the time, or which can be stamped out in factories using only a couple of parts, or which fit into preconceived aspects of a TV show. My own preferences, however, are for the robot to look like an actual robot, the altmode to look like its own vehicle and not a robot taking a nap, and for there to be a satisfaction to the transformation process - a sense that something has actually been accomplished. Plex designs don't do that for me.