The TV show Transformers Animated was sadly cut short before its fourth and final season could be produced. Over time, concepts, concept art and even unreleased toy designs from the cancelled season 4 have become common discussion points in the Transformers fandom. I had heard about the powermaster armour concept supposedly slated for season 4, but while browsing the internet I found design sketches and completed CAD images of the unreleased suit of armour for Optimus Prime and resolved I was going to make it a reality. Initially it was meant to be a project about preservation, allowing an unreleased design to finally exist in the world. However, the Optimus Prime designed for the suit of armour was severely modified from the general release figure, so while inspiration was taken from this design the final product was largely original engineering in order to accommodate the old figure

As stated, early on the goal was to produce a 1:1 reproduction of the unreleased toy. I took large numbers of proportional measurements from the renders in the Allspark Almanac 2 in order to reproduce the arms. While the smooth bulbous surfaces of the animated toyline were difficult to reproduce in Solidworks, through good measurement and planning I was able to achieve the look fairly accurately. The elbows would go through many iterations before the final design was settled on, but this was not due to engineering issues as much as changes in my approach to joints over time. These days I use TPU components in joints for robust and sturdy joints that dont wear out when rubbing against the soft PLA. The fists proved the most difficult part to reproduce, but they too were successfully copied through patient measuring and sculpting

The leg armour was next and like the arms it was largely a case of measuring and reproducing as effectively as possible. This was a fairly smooth process, though sculpting the kneecap and the kneecap detail proved very difficult. Rebuild errors and odd cuts meant that in the end, I needed to rebuild it from scratch after initial modelling for the sake of being able to modify it for transformation if needed. The actual transformation of the legs was not shown in the drawings I was working from, so the toe folding away and the collapsing of the shin guards was designed by scratch, going through 1 revision for the sake of stability

The backpack proved the most difficult part to engineer. On the original design the shoulders and backpack wings were a single component that pegged onto the back of the robot mode, but as I had different spaces and tooling to work with that wasn’t a workable solution. As such, I designed a shoulder block to peg into the existing torso for the arms to mount on, and a backpack for the wings and ladder that which hooked onto the light-bar on Prime’s back. The wings themselves were fairly simple, two flat planes built around the existing shapes of the feet and the arms to roughly contain all the parts for cohesion in vehicle mode. Getting everything to tab together was an issue, and this was the project where I decided to first experiment with TPU joints to rectify this issue. The backpack itself went through a few revisions for the sake for stability and to ensure everything lined up

To match the original design I built a fake bumper to clip onto the torso. I also produced a Magnus Hammer that would scale appropriately in combined mode. Sadly I could not find a way to integrate these into the vehicle mode so they must sit aside when transformed. Finally, I broke up the whole model into individual coloured components so that I could have full colouring without having to paint. I am incredibly proud of the end product, I feel it captures the spirit of the design well and looks suitably imposing in both modes. It is by far the most popular thing I have designed, and I am currently working on releasing the files to the public, however at present I feel they need refining as I learned a lot over the course of this project and there are a few things I would definitely change were I to start from scratch