Milan's Systems Modelling Blog

Before we say goodbye to this blog and I return back to my main one , let's take one last look back at what I did and what I learned. The Game With the game, I believe I created a full-fledged, albeit 5 minute video gaming experience. Rather than a prototype, I would describe the resulting project as a vertical slice . In terms of being a prequel/sequel, Simulation sees the reintroduction of many things from Survival (recreated from scratch and improved upon of course) as well as the addition of new features (such as the raycast-based Environment Scanner and difficulty settings) and a fresh core gameplay mechanic. For the assignment, I did reuse a lot of the knowledge I already had from Foundation Year. I did also explore some new features of Unreal Engine, such as using raycasts, creating/modifying materials and importing fonts/sounds/models into it. The Gun Scattergun by TDTechnologist on Sketchfab The gun was not my first 3D creation, as I have ...

One final thing I have to do before I am done with the assignment is of course to combine the game and the gun I made into one! In Maya, with the gun group selected, I went into File ->  Send to Unreal -> Selection . Then I selected my Unreal Project and named the exported file. I was presented with some more export options, but I didn't modify them to see what happens. It seems the paint I applied to the gun couldn't be exported. Ah well! Then I switched into Unreal. Here I was presented with yet another window with options. Again, I didn't change any of them to see what would happen. After the import process finished, I got several errors: No smoothing group information was found in this FBX scene. After looking around in the exporter in Maya, I realized including " Smoothing Groups " was one of the options of the export. Checking this seems to have resolved the issue. ShockwaveGun_BackSight has degenerate tangent bases which will result...

With the gun complete and the game as well, there are only a few more things left to do in the game project before I put them together. Cleaning Up the Project Having a messy project usually wouldn't matter too much, as long as the person (or people) working on it know where everything is. However, a messy project can be difficult to navigate, especially after long periods of time or if new people are being brought on board a project. That's why I'm going to clean my project up to a more acceptable standard! The World Outliner allows for easy access to all the objects in the scene. However, if they're not categorised properly, accessing them can be a right pain. Thankfully the Outliner does allows for proper categorisation through the use of Folders. I chose to sort my objects by their room and type. So all the floors in Test Chamber 01 will be in Test Chamber 01/Floors . As for my project folders, they are already properly categorised and clean......

As promised in my last post, this post will go over how I added sounds and some other cool "effects" and stuff into the game. Let's start with audio, shall we? Audio Throughout its development, Robotrooper: Simulation was completely silent. This isn't good, as games usually can't rely on their visuals alone. Simulation is no exception. Implementing audio isn't the hard part, at least not for me personally. Finding the right sounds is. Fortunately, I have a large library of downloaded sounds at my disposal, most of them from the numerous free #GameAudioGDC Bundles. The audio that I ended up using are: 17 REVERSE EFFECT from Free Sampler by Bingoshakerz ( Free license ) BASS - C - Sick Neuro Shred from Orgasmic Glitch Hop FREE by Black Octopus Sound ( Free license ) 05 Melody Loop Cmin 140Bpm from Future Chill 10 Free Sounds by Production Master ( Free license ) SpaceShip Engine Large Loop 00 from Sci-Fi Sound Effects Library by LittleRo...

Though I was done modelling and applying materials for the most part, I wanted to explore some of the other tools Maya has to offer. One tool that caught my attention is the 3D Paint Tool , found right at the end of the Rendering Shelf . The tool can be used to paint over parts of a mesh's texture with the color of one's choice. I was going to use it on the barrels of the gun. Before paint can be applied, the mesh in question needs to have a texture on it. This can be assigned through the Tool Settings , in the File Textures section. Once done, you can pa... just kidding. After applying a bit of paint, I noticed no paint was being applied to a bit of the mesh. That's why it's probably for the best to check the mesh's UVs first. I opened up the UV Editor . The part of the barrel I was trying to paint on wasn't properly unwrapped. This was easy to fix. On the top navigation menu, I chose Polygons and scrolled down to and pressed Unfold . Voila, ...

Today I'd like to take a look at how I tried making the gun model a bit more efficient than it was. Based on my research, the original Scattergun model in Team Fortress 2 consisted of: Verts: 923 Edges: 2627 Faces: 1711 Tris: 1711 UVs: 145 My gun, on the other hand, consisted of: Verts: 1093 Edges: 2104 Faces: 1029 Tris: 1891 UVs: 1414 Somehow, while having less Faces and Edges, I managed to have a lot more vertices than the model I'm trying to recreate! To improve the poly count, I began deleting unnecessary edges (i.e. edges that don't really need to exist, because they add no detail to the model). There were quite a few of these all over the model! For the barrels, I deleted their inner edges, then collapsed the middle face inwards to create a shorter hole. By doing this, I managed to reduce the model to the following: Verts: 884 Edges: 1331 Faces: 465 Tris: 1509 UVs: 1126 Now that's much more efficient than it was! Or at...

In this blogpost, I will tackle the details on the gun, as well as applying materials to it. Modelling Details My first order of business was adding the front sight. I created it by adding a Polygon Cube , which I then subdivided height-wise into three pieces. By dragging the new top edges out and playing with them for a bit, the sight took on the right shape. Next I created the back sight. I began with a Polygon Cube , which I subdivided, this time both height-wise and depth-wise. I extruded its left and right bottom faces, then adjusted its width and height to match the schematics. Once that was done, I created two more Polygon Cubes. I used these to perform a boolean operation on the original, finally getting the shape of the back sight. The cylinder has a rectangular shape with rounded edges cut into its right side. I used the Bezier Curve Tool to create the shape, converted it into a planar and extruded it. Then I had to find the right angle to cut it out at, so ...

Starting Robotrooper: Simulation felt like a rude awakening. You launch the game and all of a sudden you're standing in this unknown place, holding a gun, being told what to do. To ease the player a bit more into the game, I added a splash screen , where the player is prompted to press any key to begin the game. However, the game does not yet begin, because I also added difficulty settings . So the next thing the player does is pick one of them. They are casual , standard and rigorous (or easy, normal and hard, if you will). These change the amount of lives the player has and the amount of lives the turrets in the game have, as well as the speed at which they shoot out projectiles. Also, no hints are offered after dying and respawning at a checkpoint on the rigorous difficulty. Implementation The "Title Screen" widget is created and added to the viewport from the Level Blueprint . The Level Blueprint is ideal for code that is not reusable, i.e. executi...

In my last blogpost, I created the first half of the gun. In this one, I am going to detail how I finished the rest of it. The first thing I did was add a view of the gun from the back. This was to help me with modelling a thin panel which appears in front of the grip. A simple shape, created by stretching a Polygon Cube and Bevelling its edges. Once the panel was done, I switched the top Polygon Shelf out with the Curves / Surfaces Shelf . Using the Bezier Curve Tool I drew a rough shape of the grip. The tool didn't seem to behave like it does in Illustrator which I am used to, so I did not get the shape I desired straight away. After some googling, I found out I could go back and SHIFT + RMB click on individual points with little difficulty, editing their type and curvature. SHIFT + RMB clicking the curve also brings up the option to Open or Close it, which came in handy since I couldn't get the first and last point to connect in another way. Now it was...