3D character · Mascot
Max
An industrial mascot for Swivl’s AI home-service assistant
Swivl works with plumbers, electricians, roofers and field technicians. They wanted a mascot, but no human figure, no toy and nothing cute. It had to feel industrial and functional, like a tool you’d trust on the job.
- Client
- Swivl
- Tool
- Blender
- Role
- Concept, 3D modelling, shader animation, logo
Built from slabs
The reference was TARS from Interstellar, a robot made of nothing but blocks that rearranges itself to walk, roll or carry.
How TARS was designed has always stuck with me. Max takes the same idea down to three legs and a faceted gold head: no face, no limbs, just parts that look like they could hold a weight or carry a tool.
Three legs, on purpose
Max’s standing pose matches the Swivl mark: two legs splayed out, one straight down, and the head on top. The mascot and the logo read as one family.
A display that never stops thinking
One leg carries a screen that runs an endless loop of numbers and text calculating. It isn’t a video. It’s built entirely from shader nodes in Blender: the nodes read characters from a glyph atlas, and some basic maths decides which glyph shows where, and when.
Because it’s procedural, it loops forever and can show something new just by changing a few values, from a stream of code to a phone icon when Max takes a call. It’s something I started exploring recently, and there’s a lot more it can do.
Details
A dark, satin shell with panel lines and vents, gold for the parts that matter, and the MAX logo inset like a maker’s badge.
A logo to match
The mark is Max himself, reduced to three legs and a head. The wordmark is cut from the same hard angles.
