The "Star Wars Celebration 2016." London ended yesterday, and the staff responsible for creating the true BB-8, who appeared in theaters and the Oscar red carpet this year, was there to talk about the robot. Until then, many people assumed that he had only been made in computer graphics, given the many difficulties that a type of device represented for the current engineering.
Various toys and even life-size replicas of the robot were produced there and worked relatively well to "walk", but none had the interactive capacity of the head of the original BB-8 or its quick and agile mobility, as was shown in the movie Star Wars : The force awakens.
An internal mechanism of the film BB-8
To explain how it was done BB-8 film of Matt Denton programmers and Josh Lee explained that there were several versions of the robot, one for each purpose. Thus, it was possible to replicate a number of his actions without having to actually build something extremely complicated and complete.
Among the versions of BB-8 to the big screen, some were just puppets controlled by human arms that were removed with the help of chroma-key. Nevertheless, most of the film was made with real robots, which had a minimum of autonomy.
One of the puppets used in the production to represent BB-8
The creators of the project, however, had only two months to research and development and another three months to assemble all the robots that would be used in the film.
As part of the production was done in a desert, the robots also wore a lot and had to be made in a modular fashion so that damaged parts could be replaced quickly. Check out the video for demonstrations.
