low Poly Chattering Teeth Character Finalization

Finished up the low Poly Chattering Teeth texture mapping & made the very simple animation for him. Not really sure if he needs an idle animation or not or what would even be good for an idle animation for that matter but later on today I'll export him into Unity 3D and get him all set up to attack Bud the Spud. ;)

He has a partially detailed interior in that there is a box for the motor, and the gear plate that makes the upper jaw move. I did not place in the little cog or cam, I figured it will most likely never be seen in the game engine so why bother creating the extra poly. I will make a high poly version available and for that one I will place in the little cam or cog. I'll most likely need to make a better texture map for the high poly version as well.

Sand Box Robot Set Up and Testing

I was hoping to have something a little more constructive accomplished between yesterday and today, but I was having some issues trying to code my robot to work properly. You can see here in my testing area, which is a simple scene in which I test stuff out before making it into a prefab to place into game scenes later on. You may recall me mentioning that I should have been able to modify the machine gun sentry script to work for my robot. Well yes and no. Seems I can get it to partially work the way I want. I have his animations all set up as:

• Aware
• Shoot
• Deactivate

Aware: is supposed to play a short animation where the robots moves and shifts a little buried in the sand and his chest doors pop open to reveal his guns as bud the Spud gets within a certain range.

Shoot: is supposed to then play the animation in which the robot torso spins 360 degrees 1 turn but is a looped animation.

Deactivate: Is supposed to play an animation where the chest doors close as the robot guns retract back inside of his chest area.

Sounds simple enough right? Until you get to start trying to code it that is, still working on it.
The other issue that might kill this great idea with the robot, is that he might be too high poly for this type of attack scenario. In making him in Max 8 I was trying very hard to keep him as low to medium poly as I could without sacrificing too much detail in the robot. But when he animates in Unity 3d's editor the whole scene slows to a crawl, so I might in the long run just have him as a nice sand box decoration :( (sadness) because I was really liking the idea of placing him right by the bridge crossing the sand castle mote. I suppose I can rework him in Max 8 and try and bring his poly count down a lot more. That is indeed if that is the issue as it could be the machine gun script rotating him as well as his rotation animation playing at the same time.

I tried making my own script similar to the "Jack in a Box" script but got really weird results like the animations would play making the robot move way below his desired location, so I've no idea what was going on there as it works for the "Jack in a Box." ??

Jack in a Box re Texturing

I figured I might as well get right to it and re texture map the "Jack in a Box" with new maps that I can use. I still pulled some google images to use as a basis for my maps but I gave them a jolly good reworking in Corel Painter so now they are original enough for me to be able to use and redistribute with my model. In some way it was kind of a shame as I had grown quite fond of the maps I was originally using but I'm very satisfied with these, they have a more hand painted look and I tried to keep the overall painting style consistent, it also gave me a chance to fix up some areas of the texture map that I was not 100 percent happy with from the first batch of textures I was using.

I'm still having that freaking import issue from Max 8 into Unity 3D with it buggering up my head of my Jack in a Box and flipping the normals in a very weird way that it also affect the direction the light hits the head part of the model as well... really do not know how to fix that. But last night I did a little experimenting and I found that if I use the Nature soft occlusion leaves material, (it's the wrong texture I know but the only one I could think of that was double sided), tweak the setting and place a point light inside of the head that I can make it look somewhat passable if I have too... but I would rather that the Fracking problem fixed. After this post it will be some more searching on the web to see what I can find out from anyone else who is suffering from the same stoooopid issue... C'mon Unity Fix your Fracking Software!!