WALL-E: SolidWorks Design (2017)

Software: SolidWorks (Modelling and Rendering), SolidWorks Simulation (FEA), Photoshop (Texture Mapping)

I first touched CAD (Computer-Aided Design) in 2017, and my world was changed. Roughly two months after learning how to set up an assembly, my professor assigned us a “CAD Anything” final project; I decided to model, simulate, and render WALL-E.

I should clarify that at the time of starting this project I was aware of the differences between parametric and non-parametric modelling software, and that cartoon animation is almost entirely better served by mesh-based modelling. For some reason I decided that it didn’t matter. All modelling, simulation, and rendering was completed in SolidWorks.

Modelling

I tried to stay true to the film and gave WALL-E as many degrees of freedom as I could: his door opens and closes, his arms are fully actuated, the trash compression chamber can open pneumatically, and his eyes move up and down. I also managed to crash my university-allocated storage almost immediately.

Modelling itself had a pretty interesting workflow: most of the things I’ve designed/modeled don’t already exist, so a lot of this process involved harvesting dimensions from existing top/front/side views and creating a master sketch around then before fleshing out the details in each part.

Simulation

At one point in the movie, WALL-E gets crushed by a closing door. Some people would be thinking about how sad it is that the main character got tin-canned. Some people would be wondering how on earth a hatch with this much closing force passed inspection. Is there OSHA in the future? The people must know.

Simulated maximum deflection under 500,000 lbf is less than half an inch, which makes sense for 1/4" steel walls but also makes for a much less dramatic finale — it’s safe to say that this assumes a lot about the joints/connections of the points, but given that the movie explicitly shows WALL-E’s housing crumpling before any of the welds, some artistic liberties were probably taken.

Rendering & Animation

Rendering wasn't in the official assignment, but I wanted to have some fun and see if making a photorealistic model was even possible in SolidWorks — I’d messed around in Blender a bit by this point, and I wanted to see if I could achieve similar results with PhotoView360.

At its core SolidWorks is a design software first and a rendering software second. I ended up building them in Photoshop; SolidWorks is really not designed for good mapping so betting the textures cropped to the right flats took a lot of back-and-forth. Even so, this still turned out to be a huge time-saver for things like the control panel and shell detailing (scratches, rust), which looked nicer with textures but didn't need to be custom modeled to achieve the same effect.

Lessons Learned

This was a great primer for developing a SolidWorks workflow, including multibody parts, subassemblies, and master modelling. From a non-engineering perspective, I also got to stretch my legs a little with texture mapping and animation, and I also discovered that the school server has a cap on how many files you can save at one time.

After graduation, my workflow has improved exponentially—it’s fun to look back on this feature tree, but it’s also fun to imagine what could be done with proper surfacing and top-level assemblies.