Elmo Sketches: GAME PROJECT

GAMES COLLABORATION PROJECT: A group of programmers have been asked to design a game aimed at 14-19 years audience. It should be educational about the laws of physics and use these principles in some way, e.g. gravity, electricity, magnetism etc.

I will create the game art and vehicles.

The next vehicle to be created is the tank, which will be largest vehicle in the game.

helpful link:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-228328.html

I started with a simple model for the tank body and looked at how the tracks could be made and move in the game. The locators could be used the same way as the tread should move around the wheels as the tank moves. The programmers had already decided to animate this in UNITY themselves, but for my own benefit I wanted to try and find a way that I could this myself.

The most popular method I found for this was to use Maya's wire tool. This way I could model the tracks to fit around a circle wire frame and then use the control vertex points to shape the wire frame to fit the tank.

This works well but I still find there are problems with the treads distorting around the wire frame as I try to rotate. Also, this only moves the treads when rotating them, as opposed to them rotating as the tank body moves back and forth. Perhaps the wire frame can then be used with the locators to achieve this effect.

After this I was able to finish the model, which needed some tweaking after building the treads. Again, the body itself was kept fairly simple, so extra details would be in the texture map.

This video demonstrates the Method I used to create a wire frame

for the tank treads so that the object would rotate around the wire.

A simple method I tried to duplicate the tread along the wire, was to use Maya's animation tools, motion path, followed by animation snapshot. This works great as its fast, however The main problem with this was the spacing between the treads, bunching up at the start and end of the wire. This was due to Maya taking into account the animation principle, ease in ease out, when attaching an abject to a motion path. This was solved using the graph editor.

After this I was able to finish the model, which needed some tweaking after building the treads. Again, the body itself was kept fairly simple, so extra details would be in the texture map.

For the textures I used Photoshop to build up a rusty metal feel using these images. The chipped paint and rust to make the metal seem battle worn and used.