Been working on a project for a friend of designing their character who's supposed to be 'old-school' femme with the mix of techno-organic stylings, but having trouble figuring a better transformation at the moment.
Right now I was thinking something where the beast mode half would work something like Oilslick's bot mode with the additional horse head. Horse legs with the wheels through the bottom half of the legs with the head on top.
What's messing me up is how to work that with the vehicle and robot modes. My current idea was something like the legs fold in and together on both sides similar to Oilslick's back alt mode. The head splits at the top and folds backwards alongside the back of the neck and folds down and backwards for the vehicle mode.
In robot mode, the front legs would fold backwards and form a backpack with the head folding down and to the sides into the arms... Anyone have any suggestions on this or maybe a different suggestion of how to go about it?

I've been working on motorcycle Transformers for a while... but wikipedia says this Tomahawk is a 4-wheeled motorcycle, and I can't find pictures.
Also hard to understand your description, like when you leave out whether a part is a beast or robot part, and what mode it's going from and into. There was also a part where you said twice that the head folds backwards.
Anyways... there is a kind of silly WebDiver toy that turns from a 6-wheeled vehicle into a centaur.
My first thought at Oilslick and horse would be to turn the armor parts over the front wheels into the upper legs of a horse. front or back. I wouldn't be putting wheels on the bottoms of horse feet. That really messed with the proportions.
Oh wait... I found pictures of that Tomahawk. Man, that thing is WEIRD! ... yeah, you got me stumped. I can see a horse torso in that vehicle, but that's about it. I'd maybe fold the front wheels into the body of the bike, exchanging places with a horse head and front legs, but I can't see how it would work with a robot mode as well. Back legs... well, the back wheel is about right for the hips, but it needs to extend down in addition to the thin legs halfway down, so once again it would likely have to come out from inside the alt mode body. Inelegant.

How accurate to that alt mode is it going to be? How concerned are you with realism in transformation? (I'm guessing toy realism isn't something you go for judging by your previous work) How can a character be "'old-school' femme with the mix of techno-organic stylings"?

Man, there need to be more (well done) robot-vehicle-animal triple-changers. I have a couple I've had on my to-do list forever that I've never developed properly beyond the concepts. Both 70's Corvettes (like G1 Tracks). One's male, and transforms into a wolf. The other is female, and transforms into a crow. Shumworld is the only one who ever drew my character.

Okay, first off, the Tomahawk is not a motorcycle.

The Tomahawk is insanity with a seat strapped to it. That's a Viper powerplant with a couple wheels and something to hang onto.

Second... I wouldn't get too attached to it being a perfect Alternator-level perfect model version of the Tomahawk. Unless you go movie-style, like with Classics Ironhide, where you make the robot/beast mode wad up randomly, and then extrude plates and flanges to make up the slashed-up vehicle mode...

Or do G1 model-sheet transformations, where things don't really have to fit, and grow and shrink as needed...

If you could make the wheels a lot bigger, you could use the suspension links to spread them out, then pull them in along the sides, have the horse legs unfurl from inside like TM Rattrap's rear ratty legs. The horse head would be that forward 'Fuel tank' bulge on top, pull that forward and hinge the horse head out from underneath.

Robot mode, unfurl the bottom half as legs Oil Slick style, the arms nestled away Thunderblast style inside somewhere... Or folded double along the sides, with those rectangular exhaust headers strapped along the sides of the forearms as shields. Drop the horse head down on the chest, the horse neck horizontal across the top of/down between the shoulders, pop the robot head up from the back of the horse neck. Vehicle wheels would be shoulder and hip shields.

weird.......I'm working on a similar character that changes into a Tomahawk and a velociraptor.

I share your frustration at figuring out the transformation.

Sorry about the late reply guys! @_@ I kind of fell into one of those Art pittraps and avoided Iacon for a while....
I'm going to take a whack at all your suggestions, then post them up here because I'm really open to a bunch of them and I might use some of them for later characters. : ) I wasn't going so much for a literal translation of the mode, more a cybertronian equivalent like Oil Slick's mode. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
Ravage, basically what I meant with "old school, but with Techno-organics" could be kind of considered to be how Animated's been doing the femmes really. The character's slightly more chunky then most TOs, but the body shape is more intune with a TO structure. : ) if that makes sense... someone could probably describe it better then me.

I have no idea what that means...
first off, my only known definition of techno-organic is technorganic from Beast Machines... the wiki mentions use outside of Beast Machines to refer to absolutely anything remotely organic involved with Transformers. (it's a buzz-word outside of BM context)
Animated itself doesn't seem to have one method of doing female characters, other than the art style which isn't just for females. We have Elita-1, Blackarachnia, and Arcee so far... one of them actually is technorganic.
They're "more chunky" "than most TOs"... which TOs?

Should I reply to your PM here? my PM box is usually almost full.

Sure! reply away here...
Well, Dez pointed it out once that my artwork tends to be more organic then mechanical sometimes. The sad thing now that I think about it, the more chunky ones I was thinking about were Stryka and the female Speed Planet leader...
It's hard to explain really, but I guess another way to look at it is more in line with the Animated male characters. They have 'chunky'/'kibbleness', but it blends in better with their bot modes better in a way that makes them appear 'organic'.

I have no idea what you're saying...
The wheels are the basis of what? What was the basis of "it" on Oil Slick?

What's a flip-back component?

Support struts in vehicle mode? Does this mean in robot mode she has giant wheels for forearms and lower legs?


I thought you said the horse head was attached to the back, not the front... you mean the robot's back, not the vehicle's back?

I would look at some photos of a horse if you're not intimately familiar with them. They have an odd shape to them that's easy to mangle into something very un-horse-like. You don't want to end up with a dog. Horses have VERY big necks, which is why I suggested that on the Tomahawk, you would need to unfold the entire neck and head out of the vehicle mode. Now if you're just taking the Tomahawk as a basis for a Cybertronian mode, then I'm guessing you can change the sizes and shapes of everything, put a big honkin' windscreen and shell on the front to turn into the neck.


I'm not sure the wheels really need to go anywhere. Horses don't have really narrow, tapering torsos like jaguars or cheetahs (G1 Ravage, BW original Cheetor) with hips sticking out to the side significantly.
The rods that connect the wheels to the body of the vehicle, if anything like the Tomahawk, are likely to be too short... perhaps you could use two struts on either side form two halves of a leg, basically folded into a 'V', with the bend possibly in the middle of the wheel, and another piece that attaches from the wheel to the end of the strut where it reaches the vehicle body so that the end can be folded back to meet the wheel. Of course then you'd need a third pair of struts to keep the wheels connected. If there were no extention, folding, or covering of the struts, they would have to be almost as long as the diameter of the wheels to work as upper limbs in robot mode. and the robot arms would have to compact in order to not be as long as the robot legs. the horse legs would all be the same length though, so... (too many quadruped to anthropoid TFs end up with robot arms that are too long, or one set of beast limbs that are too short)

I meant struts as in ... well, the attached image'll make more sense out of what I mean for the arms... the blue and grey segments would be where the lower beast legs would be if I was kitbashing this out of Oil Slick himself..

I would have the seat form the robot head (give her a ponytail which doubles as the horse's tail), and the rear wheel section, including the fender, would become the robot torso. The casings on the sides would become the forearms along with some made-up rear struts as the biceps. The rest of the bike would become the legs, with the horse's neck folding out and combining with the wheels to become the robot feet (the horse head halves would remain tucked inside the neck/toes). Add the horse legs as undercarriage kibble shaped like piping.

My take....

Like Ravage said, the bike is already a horse torso. It's not going to kitbash easily from something like Oilslick, but I could see possibilities with some other figures . . . .

I'd say make the center of the bike entirely hollow except for the bulges on top, and fill up the inside with the horse legs. Then, make it so that the wheels are basically the thigh and shoulder joints for the horse. The legs pull down, the wheels pop out a bit to the sides, and the head can come out of the front bulge. For the robot, fold the sides of the body/engine compartment out, basically kibble, and use the mass of the horse head to fold forward and become the torso and head. Or, a better option if you're comfortable with it, make the sides of the engine so that they can detach and become the sides of the shins as the legs pull down in transforming into robot mode. use the horse thighs as thighs and make the horse shoulders so that they bend outward, then down at another joint. Maybe you could actually use the front tires as part of the torso, the horse shoulders as shoulderpads, and just the lower front legs of the horse as robot arms? a thought.

I'd suggest the front legs should be the motorcycle handle bars and the rear legs should be the exhaust pipes.

-Edit: But of course, a tomahawk has neither of those things...