“To a man who has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Mark Twain
”When, at the dying of the sun, High Priestess Xanthorg remarks upon mankind's most lasting achievements before all known existence is extinguished in a celestial furnace, surely she will speak of the 260,000 years we spent playing Xbox Live.”
Kotaku, using cumulative Xbox Live hours played until 03/06/2007
Once I decided to put forth my best effort into becoming a game designer, I enrolled in some part-time 3D Modelling classes at the local college (while I was in my final semester of my Bachelor's). It taught me the basics of 3DS Max in modelling and animation. Although these courses consist of my only formal education in game development, after many years of learning on my own I felt prompted to go above and beyond with every assignment.
Building and animating the arachnids (seen further down this page) had taught me some great lessons in restricting movement in animation. I decided to put these lessons to practical use by creating some transforming robots.
The plan, at first, was to create a laser-equipped robot that could be used in a scifi facility. As such, I planned for it to be able to fit into small alcoves in walls, from which it would exit and unfold.
The second bot, the Welder Bot, was built to further challenge myself. On the NS2 forums, the idea was brought up of a bot that could serve a utilitarian function for the marines. With this in mind, I decided to create a bot that could fold up into a ball and roll around, then unfold and walk around like a spider. Hence, I produced the Unofficial Welder Bot.
Neither of these bots are skinned, though the Welder Bot is UVMapped. The video shows them both in action, doing their unfolding and scanning. Each model's joints are fully restricted so they may only turn in an appropriate direction and distance, allowing much easier manual animation.
While building the arachnid, I wanted to optimize where I could. Although my spiders have four pairs of legs (like real spiders), each leg only has three joints, compared to the standard seven for arachnids.
I created both walk and run animations as I had planned to use them in a larger project; a 90-second battle scene against the Bots. The action-script document for the scene can be found here.
The textures used were also optimized. I included three very small textures for the general fur, the 'butt', and the eyes. Each texture is seamless, but I did not constrain them to game standards of 2^x since this was for 3DS Max only, and I was still new to Photoshop at the time.