Hey all. moving this from tech talk to here as it's changed a bit now i've started woprking back on it properly.

Ok, for the new aim i intend to have a mech character with its two arms able to transform between 3 sets of weaponry:

A hand with some kind of palm attatchment (similar to ironman).
A large cannon.
A large rotating gun with 4 barrels.

For this i'm going to need to look into creating a custom rig as i was going to do with the previous project idea, however it will also need to use some kind of additional parts for the extra sections to animate when needed.

I havn't attempted something like this before, so i have two different ways i think i could tackle this:

Idea 1: have the 3 states of the arm (as low poly as possible) all present on the arm but hidden depending on which is being used, and when activated they simply animat out and swap with the currently active state.

Pros: no model swapping, as it's only one model.
cons: eats up resources as there are alot of hidden objects almost all the time.
requires multiple animations for one object: each gun firing, hands moving, plus each of the transformation animations.

Idea 2: have a seperate arm model for each state that has no custom animations EXCEPT for animations when the gun fires. have a 4th arm which has all three states at the same time, and which animates/cycles between the 3 states during the cycle animation. The way this would work is have the first state of the weapon on the character first, for example the hand state. The player switches to the cannon, the hand state is seemlessly replaced by the 3 in one model which then animates to the cannon. once the animation is complete, this model then seemlessly changes to the cannon only model and play continues.

Pros: less resources used most of the time with only the one gun present any one time when not transforming (no idden objects).
multiple arm models, meaning no need to share alot of animations on the same model (cannon only needs cannon firing + intergration with rest of body, 3in1 arm only needs the transform animation)

cons: will need to create a total of 9 arms. 1 arm for each weapon selection (hand, cannon, rotating gun) and then 1 3in1 arm for each transformation :

Hand -> Cannon
Hand -> Rotating gun
Cannon -> Hand
Cannon -> Rotating gun
Rotating gun -> Hand
Rotating gun -> Cannon

For starters i have my high poly mech character now complete with all three arm states.

current update:





I'll be needing some help from fellow modellers and scripters (kind of a novice at scripting) for unreal in order to get this working in game.

The coding idea offered by SpeCter still has uses i think in this new project so i'll be trying to build on that where i can.

Also, does anyone know where i can get any information on the transformers models in the transformer movie games? i'm pretty sure they use some kind of alternate model swap when transforming between the robot model and the car/vehicle model. Just can't seem to find anything on it.

Ok, update on this, been working on and off with it for a while. Still got one more gun/arm to create which is the one with fingers, but the other two are done. I also have both of these guns transforming (at least into a "arm pod") for now, although not yet working in UDK (had it working, but new computer etc etc think i lost the PSA file, also need to find actorX for 2012 or move to 2011 and re-export).

here're the two weapons so far:



there are still a few untextured sections, but those will get filled in sooner or later. They share the same texture sheet 1024x1024 to minimise memory, but that's not really a concern with this project, just something i wanted to do to save time.

I'm also in the process of re-doing the main body of the mech. I want to get it done asap as it's not really much of a cocern again for the project, the weapons are. So hopefully i can get it finished not long after the christmas period. Most of the mech will stay similar to the original mesh i made, but for some reason i either pro-optimised it when making the low poly, or it got corrupted, not sure which >< so i'm re-making most parts, also to minimise any difficult sections, which currently are all over the place. Smoother flat areas will be better and won't neccessarily look worse.

Comments and critique from fellow posters have recommended using the socketting with UDK for the weapons which has promted this new direction

Just need continued crit and help on the project where possible. As i say, i will be altering the design of the robot as its not as sleak or as easy to retop as i could be.

damn, im bump this back up. Great work man!

crit wise, the normals lack depth.
this might be due to the sharpness of your edges on the model, beef em up a bit and the angles will help with the depth.

working a bit more on this. Thanks Alberto, i'll have a look in to the normals at a later stage as they're not really important right now and also i'm using the same texture sheet for both guns to keep texture and mapping time to a minimum.

I've got both of these animating in UDK now, however changes are being made to them both to fill gaps, and also to change the "jet engine" pods on the 4 barrel gun as i don't think it suits it. but here's the animation (quality aint all that good im afraid):

this is so cool

Hey man, awesome work. It's a freakin' shame threads like this don't get more attention. As someone that stares at Transformers all day, I must say, you are a total bad ass.

As far as the animations go here's a couple videos Game Informer did on the animations a couple months ago.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featur...nsformers.aspx

Keep goooooing!

Wow thanks Nerf, definitely gona put those videos to use.

Also, here's an update on this project:

I've been working on a newmech to reduce poly count for the character as it's not the main focus. Previously the other mech was way too detailed and had too many fiddly parts, so i made a new mech which i've managed to get down to 3.6k tris for the low poly:



Still alot more to do on it, but most of it is out of the way now. Just got to concentrate on some coding work and getting the weapons to animate correctly now.

another update on this. I've almost finished the textures now. Just a few final pieces to do, a few more split lines and small details maybe some more text and metal sections. (the black areas could do with a tidy up).

Damn dude! Those weapon animations are hot as hell!

Looking great. Can we see some wires or texture flats???

cheers UDK is a bit of a ballache to get propper wire frames going so until i get marmoset i'll just leave the wireframe from the normals bake above as is.

Here're the flats for the mech:

Hi guys, continuing with this (i'm currently working on a quick idle animation for the character) i'm going to require some help from any coder who knows how the weapon animations work in UDK.

Basically as my first post describes, i'm going to need to be able customise the animation when changing weapons (currently it's just a quick "gun goes out of view, gun comes into view") so that the animations would be "gun 'retract' animation begins followed by next gun 'protract' animation begins, resulting in the appearance of the arm tranforming.

The only change to the first post here is that thereis no longer a 3rd weapon (hand) so it's just switching between weapon one and weapon two.

Can anyone give me a view pointers? Would really apreciate it

The way the guns will be attached to the character is just using sockets setup on the elbows and the guns themselves will act as the fore-arms.

Hey guys, ok i need a bit of help on this. I have my weapons and character in game now (no animations on either yet) So i was hoping somone could answer this question.

For the animations to work do they need be named a certain thing? My gun animations for equip and putdown are "IonCannon_OUT" and IonCannon_IN" (same for gatling gun) Do these animation sequences within the PSA need to be renamed "WeaponEquip" and WeaponPutdown"?

Oh and also, is there a way to rename sequences within the PSA without having to re-export it again?