Dread Pirate Robot (Project Weasel)

Dread Pirate Robot (Project Weasel)

I'm still (slowly) making progress on Project Weasel (obviously, I'm targeting mobile now). Here's my first reasonably complete bad guy. (I'll probably end up making several texture variations, so he may end up being a good guy as well.)

podperson said:

I'm still (slowly) making progress on Project Weasel (obviously, I'm targeting mobile now). Here's my first reasonably complete bad guy. (I'll probably end up making several texture variations, so he may end up being a good guy as well.)

Click to expand...

Nice work and good progress! Are you going to publish with the help of an engine or roll your own? (Just curious)

I should mention that this character represents my current workflow and is a testament to C3D's ridiculous productivity (at least for me). This character went from pencil sketch to modeled, textured, rigged, animated, and rendered in about 8h total.

Lighting is a single distant light with ambient occlusion (I'm trying not to flatter a game model with clever lighting — all of these effects are achievable in real-time with Unity, although SSAO and depth of field are not doable on mobile).

Tools used were Cheetah 3D and Sketch 2, with iMovie (I spend about 5 minutes in Motion and realized I was WAY overthinking it) for and GifBrewery used to assemble a video and export GIFs. Note that the materials are vectors — so in theory if Unity ever supports SVGs for textures (which I hope will be soon) they could be resolution independent and tiny.

@icodealot

I'm writing the game using Unity (I'm tempted by UE4, since the chance I will make more than $300k from a game — which is where UE4 becomes more expensive than Unity — is remote).

I have the workflow from Cheetah 3D to Unity pretty much ironed out (and in fact I'll probably be adding a big section to the book's 3rd edition on this specific topic).

One of the ridiculously awesome things in recent versions of Unity is realtime shadows on mobile (well, higher-end mobile, anyway; forget 95% of Android devices) which makes things much more pleasant (baking everything is a pain in the butt no matter how you handle it).

Fantastic! Really cool stuff. I love how you blend the technical aspects with a cool style of modeling that always recognizable as yours. :icon_thumbup:

Tiling Terrain Components (Project Weasel)

More progress. I've actually had this geometry around for a couple of years, but had a lot of trouble creating satisfactory textures for it (that would be economical and easy to maintain and riff on). I'm pretty happy with these results.

The modeling is, of course, all Cheetah 3D. The texture map was created in iDraw, tweaked in Sketch 3, and then redone from scratch in Sketch 3 using the earlier version as a template.

The render is (again) a single directional light and Ambient Occlusion (default settings).

podperson said:

...
One of the ridiculously awesome things in recent versions of Unity is realtime shadows on mobile (well, higher-end mobile, anyway; forget 95% of Android devices) which makes things much more pleasant (baking everything is a pain in the butt no matter how you handle it).

Click to expand...

Thanks for the notes on your process. Its a personal goal that I will publish something and playing around with Cheetah (and Unity) are pushing me to do that. I look forward to seeing your title in the app store.

Here's a new render of the robot — I've tweaked the texture mapping and the texture map, and I've textured and tweaked his gun.

Very Cool Pod - the upgrades to the robot's face are great nuances - the whole project is a great exercise in economy and effectiveness - thanks for sharing - it's inspiring to see the project evolving.

Textures are well done, very inspiring to me!
Which Channel is the 'Weasel News'? :icon_thumbup:

Some more stuff. The "hulking robot" is a variation on "big robot" (he'll be much bigger, have a modified texture and move more slowly, but it's the same rig). Also the alien snail's "walk cycle" (note that the news anchor on Weasel News is the snail).

Robot looks cool. The game sounds promising. :icon_thumbup:

Looks cool ! Great Job!

Let us know if there will be a playable version of this game. It looks promising based on the characters. Thanks.

A bit of a diversion. I finally set up my 3D printer in my new office. I started out simple (printing out some low poly mountains I've been working on — anything narrower at the top tends to come out well).

So then I got crazy and printed out my hulking robot. The final print is about 4cm tall. The scope on the pistol eventually fell off (the pistol design should have been tweaked not to have the thin mounting). Even so, it's by far the most ambitious print I've gotten anything more than a tangled mess out of.

Wow, that is awesome! Thanks for showing the animation of the printer creating the 3D sculpture. Very cool to see something digital like this robot turned into a real world object. :icon_thumbup: Does it use melted plastic or a type of wax polymer I wonder?

It's using ABS plastic thread — it's basically the same stuff recycled soda bottles are made from (and there's a project somewhere to build a device that allows you to recycle your own empty bottles into the thread — not sure how that's going, since the thread is not that expensive relative to the time and labor involved in grinding up bottles, melting them, and extruding them into thread).

Thanks for the info. Keep up the cool designs and sculpting.

Im curious what printer did you go with? I have been looking at makerbot and form 1 myself. still researching though.

Nice!
Cheetah3d + 3Dprinter = Infinite fun
..and helpful gadgets :tongue: