Merry Mini Mech Mechanics - Industrial Swarm Painting Drone

Concept for a drone for industrial swarm spray painting. Yes, indeed PAINTING, spray painting, not 3D printing :D. While swarm 3D printing is also extremely cool, this small guy has a different purpose. I wanted to do a little prop design here which I can feed down the line into another design. For one of my kids from the Merry Mini Mech Mechanics, I want to have some kind of a quirky customized companion drone with a lot of personality.
Since the base for this was supposed to be an existing industrial use drone from this world, I thought it diligent to start this off with designing this industrial drone first, then modifying it. The original design might be of some more use at a later date.
After some initial ideation I set my visual target to be a bird, the equivalent of a parrot sitting on a shoulder. This idea guided the first phase in which I did sketches. Rough silhouettes, more concrete forms and refinement of the most promising direction. After that the drawing took a little more concrete shape in Gravity Sketch before I brought it for rendering into blender. In that process the proportions got refined and the geometry straightened out before another round of renders in different materials for free compositing in Photoshop.

The finished version is executed as a line drawing with orthographics and some additional info, based on the different blender render passes.
I can imagine it pretty cool if a dozen or two of those literally swarm a big old warehouse etc. and make it look as good as new inside of a couple of minutes :) ...

Finished Concept

Finished Concept

Initial development stages: Ideation sketches, Gravity Sketch model, Blender renders, refined design in Blender, material renders

Initial development stages: Ideation sketches, Gravity Sketch model, Blender renders, refined design in Blender, material renders

Details 01 - Final concept

Details 01 - Final concept

Details 02 - Final concept

Details 02 - Final concept

Details 03 - Final concept

Details 03 - Final concept