Jenny Wakeman - My Life as a Teenage Robot

Hooray! Jenny's gathered her first 100 supporters. As a thank you to everyone who's gotten her here, I wanted to share a little bit about her design process. For this update, I want to talk tools. Like many other projects, Jenny is made in Bricklink Studio. If you're familiar with the program, you may have assumed I used Part Designer to apply the custom decals to the face pieces. That's usually true for my projects (both the ones currently on my profile and the secret ones in my drafts), but this time around there was a little hitch: Part Designer currently does not support the 3 x 3 round slope pieces that makes up Jenny's face. This was a bit of a problem since those curved slope pieces were essential to getting her face shape right. Initially, I planned to hold off on submitting Jenny until Part Designer updated to finally include that piece. An update or two came and went, but still no support for the piece. I didn't want to wait around too long since My Life as a Teenage Robot is currently receiving a bump in terms of popularity and merchandising, and waiting could mean missing out on her opportunity to become a set. What could I do, though?

As you're certainly aware, Jenny's eyes and mouth decals are visible in the project images. If you scrutinized the images, you probably figured out that I used an image editor to put decals on after rendering out the model. It certainly isn't my preferred method, and people who pay close attention have probably noticed some discrepancies on her face decals between pictures, but I think it works well enough to convey the spirit of the model. This is the only project where I've had to edit in the decals as part of the image creation phase, but I use an image editor in all of my projects, even the ones that don't have custom decals.

My image editor of choice is GNU Image Manipulation Program, which I've used since college. Most of the image editing work is simply importing the PNGs rendered out by Studio and putting them up against a nice gradient backdrop. In fact, this process is something I recommend for every designer, even if you don't need to make fancy decals. If you find Studio is rendering out images that go over the 5MB limit, try taking that image and exporting it out as a JPEG. JPEGs are leagues smaller than PNGs on account of not having any transparency data. If I turn off the extra data in the export process (Exif, XMP, etc.) and set the quality to somewhere between 75 and 90, I can usually get the image to export out under 1MB, which is a tremendous space save compared to the 6-7MB raw PNGs Studio gives me.

For the backdrop, I tend to pick colors associated with the IP, or in the case of some sets I may pick colors that elicit a specific theme or help the model pop. Jenny's gradient backgrounds are picked from the show logo and background colors on the show's DVD cases. In the case of custom decals, those are usually made by me. I'm a programmer by trade, not an artist, so my decals are usually kept simple. I used a few reference images from the show to help me recreate Jenny's eyes and mouth with the shape tools. Getting those decals on her face was an interesting challenge this time around, as I had to use the perspective warp and freehand select tools to match her face curvature and cut out any piece overlap. I wanted to experiment more with presentation in this project since My Life as a Teenage Robot means a lot to me, but I found out that outlines, motion blur, and flavor text (if it doesn't describe a feature or functionality) are big no-no's in the submission guidelines. You'll have to settle for enjoying those details in my update images when we hit project milestones :)

One last thing before I go: if you paid close attention to Jenny's model in this update image, you might notice something's a little off about her right shoulder. That's right, the Jenny in this picture is a different model than the one in my submitted images. If you want to see how different, you'll just have to wait for the next milestone. Be sure to share Jenny around to help her get to 1K faster! Thanks again for helping me get her this far! I hope to write the next update very soon.