Following our last game jam where my team opted to make a real escape room as opposed to a digital game, I have been thinking a bit about ideas for future games. Now, I couldn't have everything worked out, especially since I won't know the theme until the event starts. But what I can do is come up with gameplay concepts. And after my entire dev team spent a day distracted by a simple Real Time Strategy (RTS) game made by a past student, I thought this could be a good place to start.
With this in mind, I had two realizations. First, we would likely be working with 3d graphics for this kind of project. Second, none of our team members are prepared to work with organic 3d models. In short, nobody can model people. So, I decided to start work on these drone units. Since I have some blender experience I can model these drones and we can use them as the units in the game. At present I have two concepts in progress.
This was the first concept. A sort of flying drone inspired by turtles. Unfortunately this render does not show everything, so I will be improving shot composition in the future.
This second concept is based off of a bomb disposal drone. The key difference being that this one is actually armed. After creating this base model, I realized it is possible to simply remodel the top turret to create a variety of these drones with different uses.
With base models to use, I then started the process of learning two things. First, importing models into unreal. Second, adding materials and textures to these models. My first attempt went about as well as you might expect. I made several mistakes such as importing the model in OBJ format, and breaking it down into a bunch of pieces to reassemble. The reason for this being my poor understanding of the material system in unreal. In the end, this was the final result.
it doesn't look horrible, but this was using the default materials and had no functionality whatsoever. The model as stated arrived in pieces, and in OBJ format. So this was a static object. If I wanted it to move, I needed to get a skeletal mesh. And after doing some research, and failing multiple times, I managed to get the skeletal mesh working. Combine this with a better understanding of the material system so the model was now in one piece, and I was able to start learning the material nodes system.
Final model appearance.
Material nodes for the dark metallic areas.
Material nodes for the energy effect.
Material nodes for the metallic copper areas.
Material nodes for the light metallic areas.
Material nodes for the painted red areas.
Following these experiments, I learned several things. First, for randomized textures it is always best to use a noise image instead of the randomized noise node. Second, for getting specific material effects you will want to use a dedicated software such as Substance painter. As I move forwards with this project, I am going to start learning to use these new tools.
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