Sunday, March 8, 2009

Commence robotic breakdancing!


So, another update on the Steamteam department, showing what I am currently working on; THE ROBOT.

So, you've seen the designs (obviously!) and here's what I've got in 3d. I have a little more than this right now, but that'll be for later, I'm still working on alot and hope to have all the machinery ready by tomorrow (so expect another update then). The best part thusfar is that it all MOVES (<< CLICK THIS!). This is all scripted by yours truly and can be controlled by a controller that has (upto now) 4 keyable attributes, being;

-Speed Noise
-Pelvis Offset
-Middle Offset
-Back Offset

The speed noise attribute is the overall speed of all the cogs, it's called 'speed noise' because all the cog movement there is, by us, considered to be noise. We'd turn it off when animating the character and turn it on for 'animation noise' once all character animation is complete. We're not very experienced in character animation so any extra cheap detail will hopefully make it easier for us to get away with it :) The offset attributes control the speed of the cogs in different parts of the body relative to the overall speed. While the Speed Noise attribute ranges from -25 to 25 (in the playblast it being 15), the offset attributes range from -2 to 2, allowing us to change the rotation speeds for different parts from twice as fast in the opposing direction, to twice as fast in the regular direction.

What is also scripted is, that, the faster a cog turns, the 'harder' the noise is on the other axis. This means that when the speed turns up, the cogs start wobbling, randomly.

So, that's it for the robot for now, I will probably write an extensive post on the entire script once it's finished, explaining how exactly I've done all this. Mind you, this is my first time using SCRIPTS in a big project (mostly thanks to Roy's knowledge!) so don't expect INGENIOUS ways of optimizing everything if you already know some scripting. Hopefully, however, it turns out to be interesting to some folk :)

So, see ya soon!

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

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