Week 9.2 and 10.1- Slow Progress

After spending week 1 of this project entirely on the behaviour Blueprint, I moved on to making a more detailed model of the Robot based on my initial quick blockout. However I wanted to add some legs, just in case I want to add the ability to land and walk at some point.

1 - Modelling
Before starting to model I did some quick sketches figuring out how the legs could work, but overall I kept the design fairly simple, since I didn't have much time to spend on it.

The model itself needs some optimisation. It currently has about 15000 tris, which I could reduce by baking some parts, like the "eye"/visual sensor.

  I also originally planned to make the model more detailed, but didn't have the time, so I ended up not using them.

Since I wanted the legs to be animated I played around with some rigging and IK Solvers, again something that didn't get finished/ implemented in the hand-in version.

Experimental Leg IK

2 - Maxscript
Because I needed a small break from modelling and Litha had an issue with some Physics Simulation (it didn't work with her mesh), I wrote a small script to replace meshes with another one ( so that the Simulation could run with another mesh, that can then be replaced with her original one), just to see if I could do it. I came up with something very basic in about 30 min. We didn't have a chance to test it, yet.

Replace Objects Stript

3 - UE4
I also went around to adding rotation to the rotor. Essentially it has a defined rotation rate, but then compares current speed to maximum speed and adjusts the rotation rate based on that.

Rotor Rotation Blueprint

Figuring out how to rotate the eye to look at the player was slightly more tricky, because it doesn't rotate independently, but together with the robot's body.

In local space it would be very simple to limit the eye's rotation, by clamping it at the minimum and maximum rotation from 0.
However, since the player character moves in World Space, I had to figure out the eyes rotation in World Space as well. The solution to this was taking the Robot's body's rotation as the new 0, then adding/subtracting the maximum rotation angle and clamp the Look At Rotation based on those.

Look at Player

EDIT: Might have to change the way X and Y axis rotation is handled by using the robots local Rotation.

Look at Player