Its Alive!!!...And it works!!

Time to get back into the swing of things: this means getting me ready to do 3D modeling again.

I decided not only to warm up my 3D Modelling skills but also to keep up to date with my animation and rigging skills while trying something a bit more advanced. Back in 2018, I made a similar 3D robot and animated it without any rigs or skin weights,

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/old-military-robot-abbcd27e46df4ad8917967330b0c2146 So, this time I’m going to make a more advanced robot which is a mechanical spider with double the legs, more geometry, bone rigs, and at least two animations instead of one. The robot is not skin rigged organically, only skinned rigged non-organically. Meaning the parts won't easily flex or stretch, just rotate on certain parts of the mesh. This also prepares me to make my own 3D models based on my imagination rather than relying on royalty-free assets to fill the gaps in game projects too much. Original Model here: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/mechanical-spider-41413c215e744c3f844b923cccf6ffbe

WHAT I LEARNED • In Autodesk Maya, you can use layers to switch on or off image panels and 3d models. • In Unity, I learned you can turn off compress animations, with a single click to make exported animations look how it was animated in Maya rather than slight auto changes when exported in Unity. This reduces potential landmines in animation exports. • Creating IK for the legs so I can move them by dragging connected circle pivot points (once created) on the feet to move them around without dragging their bone rigs making animating much easier to execute. • In Autodesk Maya, Moving bone rigs, not in organic movement but more robotic. E.g. rotating from capsule joints. • How effective it is to break things down simply piece by piece until it gets to a complicated 3D model. • Creating bone rigs from scratch on the body and each leg rather than using Maya’s default humanoid rig. • Making bone joints connected with the cylinder joints in the legs in the center so they can be rotated accurately.

WHAT WENT WRONG? WHAT COULD I HAVE DONE BETTER? • I had some rigging issues for the spider along the way, I thought I could export the body and the rig together for the Unity game engine, even though it was skin painted, it could not be exported as a complete model. It might be due to how the geometry is parented with child objects that caused exporting issues. • I wanted to animate the fangs to move and rotate, but I couldn’t because the geometry was not straight, so I need to make sure they are straight next time so its easier to animate and they don’t look like they are wobbling around like it was about to fall off. • I didn’t really organize the layers and geometry very well including their names, so I need to get in a better habit of organizing the groups and naming conventions. • I couldn’t get the rest of the parts on each leg to sync with the walking animations, that’s why in the final render I had to take them off and just have the main legs themselves. I am going to try to keep warming up my rig and animation skills so I can get those extra parts to move and rotate with their main legs during animations like walking.

OVERALL: • I was going to try to test the mechanical spider model, rig, and animations in the unity engine, but the mesh blew up and the animations didn’t respond well to the mesh despite it being paint skinned. • It’s been a while since I rigged a 3D model in Maya, I may need more practice before I export well-polished 3D models for my next games. I had a lot of problems doing this, it didn’t really help that the tutorial for the mechanical spider I did was outdated, so next time I need to find a more updated one to teach me to make better 3d characters. • Even though it was tough, I managed to work my way around it as much as possible almost matching the intention with execution perfectly, but yet again: I will still need more practice. • Other than that, I’m happy that I tried some new techniques that can be used to make characters including robots while catching up with skills I haven’t used for a while.

#Youtube#gamedevelopment#gamedev#autodeskmaya#IndieGames#AustralianGameDevoloper#indiedev#indie#Gamedev#Maya#3D#Character#Rigging#Animation#GameDesigner#scifi#robot#SoleDevoloper#characterdesign#render#gaming