Week 10 - The third Hand-In

Since week two of this project was rather unproductive, I spend week 3 finishing modelling, making some quick textures and materials.

1 - Texturing
The textures are definitely something, that I need to spend more time on, but since I didn't want to hand in a model without textures, I made a basic texture pass. It is very likely I will rework the textures completely, because the unwrap needs to be improved.

2 - Materials
Since I did not have a lot of time left until the hand-in I improvised and built two very simple materials for the laser beam and the burning air coming out the Robot's Engine.

For the beam I used a panning noise texture and warped it with a panning normal map.

Beam Material Setup

Beam Material

After a suggestion from one of my tutors I made the color of the laser beam and eye change, when there is an obstacle in front of the robot for some more visual feedback.

Obstacle Feedback

For the engine material I used a very similar method for warping noise, but then I use it as the UV input of a gradient texture, which works like a gradient map. I also added a Hue Shift Node to change color, if necessary.

Gradient Texture vs Applied Gradient Map in UE4

Engine Material Setup

Engine Material

3 - Conclusion
Overall I feel like I more or less finished, what I set out to do with this project. Of course it still requires a lot of polishing, esprecially the Avoiding Obstacle mechanism, which works for obstacles in front, but not on the sides of the robot. Also I need to spend some more time optimising the modell and really put some more work into making the textures a lot better, since I only spend about a day on them. And lastly I need to think about an environment for presentation.