And here are the final week’s labors.
22 February: Fancy Crystal Formation
Just a bunch of crystals all stuck together. This is about two meters tall, so it’s suitable for a small obstacle.
23 February: Storage Tank with L-Shaped Access Platform
This is based on an oil tank I saw at a railyard once. It’s a big oil storage tank with a metal mesh access platform. As you can see.
LOD B improvements will include better detail on the supports and railings. The railings will get fittings to hold the railing to its supports, and the main supports will get some kind of bracing to better support the platform. And obviously the stairs will get their own railings and supports. I would have added them, but Blender was acting up pretty hard. I’ll also be adding a control panel on its own little pedestal so someone can monitor the tank, dispense its contents, or whatever else is necessary.
24 February: Generic Control Panel
As an industrial automation and robotics machine builder, I am intimately familiar with these. I have built about a thousand (literally) of them now, and installed them onto the industrial automation systems I build.
When I build something like this, I get a box of interchangeable parts and a box to install them on. Sometimes the box is pre-drilled, but if it isn’t you just have to knock the holes in it with a drill and punch, maybe a jigsaw. Next the buttons, lights, gauges, and other external components are inserted and locked in place. Then you get to wire it, which can take anything from an hour or so to several days.
From a modularity standpoint, this was a great model to work on. The boxes come in a variety of standard sizes, and the operators are already modular by design, so all I had to do was make my own versions of the operators, make a box, and attach the operators in a pattern that looked right. It was literally doing what I do on a pretty regular basis at work using Blender instead of tools.
Upgrades for LOD B and beyond are obvious – more operators with a bit more detail and labels to indicate what they do; this is a human interface device. I only scratched the surface with components here, but the detail is pretty good when you consider the expected viewing distance in-game. They’re mass-produced industrial controls, not handmade sculptures. Factories churn out thousands of these things a day using injection molding and basic assembly.
Adding code to this model is entirely situational. If it needs to be interacted with by the player, it would get appropriate code. If it’s just a scenery piece, maybe add some blink code to the lights. And if the player can destroy it, it’ll need a damage handler and code for what happens if it’s destroyed – this could easily be a mission objective or other plot point.
If I really wanted to, I could get or design an actual control system for the box and convert that to a set of code to act as a control system simulator. But why?! Nobody is going to care if the box they’re interacting with works correctly as an industrial control system in a game when all they’re really after is making it open a door, call an elevator, or start a process so they can continue in the game. Especially when they won’t have access to the schematic or any other useful information, and most of the people playing it will have any idea how to make heads or tails of what they’re looking at anyway.
25 February: Comm Dish
I designed this for a Void Pirate game concept I’m working on. The player will have to use it to advance the plot.
There are a lot of improvements that will need to be made before this one gets used in anything resembling a finished project. Among other things, I’m not 100% sold on the shape of the two big dishes, the center emitter needs a lot more detail, I need to add mounting hardware so it can be attached to its gimbal, and the existing materials aren’t exactly what I want.
Before it can go operational as anything but a static scenery piece it will need a mover script to make it move around semi-randomly on its gimbal in idle mode, then move and lock to a specific angle when activated by the player.
26 February: Chainsaw Bot Modifications
When I was rendering a few scenes I noticed they took gorram forever. After a bit of experimentation, I determined the culprit was the Chainsaw Bot, specifically all those little teeth on the chainsaw. So I’ll need to do a redesign of the saw at the very least, probably involving replacing the individual teeth with some kind of science fictiony energy blade or maybe just a weird material to do the same trick as the foliage on trees in a lot of games.
Because I’m going for modularity, I only tweaked the heads. I could have just done the upgrade systems without heads (which will be how I end up doing the in-game version), but it would be hard to really get what was going on without the head for context. So before you start asking what kind of barbarian I am for chopping these poor robots’ legs off, relax. The AI hasn’t been installed yet anyway, so they don’t even know they’re still just parts.
I had the idea a while back to replace the chainsaw with a circular saw – the circular saw has a lot less geometry, and would be a lot more reliable in actual use. A circular saw could also be on the end of a piston so it could slam forward and make up for its lack of reach compared to a chainsaw’s blade. I didn’t implement that part, but I did make the circular saw.
One of the original design ideas involved adding a taser to the chainsaw housing so it would zap its victims as it carved them up. So I made the electrodes and added a little control box to the back of the robot’s head. I also added a car battery to the roof to power it.
If I have time I’ll also be adding a flamethrower upgrade. The way I have things set up, the robot can have either the chainsaw or circular saw, and can optionally include the electrodes or flamethrower module. With some work I could tweak the flamethrower’s tanks to allow them to work with the electrodes’ control module.
27 February:
As you may have noticed, I do a lot of industrial stuff. Industrial areas require ventilation. Not only will your facility never clear inspection to be constructed without proper ventilation, but insufficient ventilation will have OSHA all over you if they see it. So I made a basic ventilation unit. It’s a fan and duct section in a box that can be placed on a wall or exposed duct as an air mover.
To go operational as a GameObject, I just have to add a basic spin script to the fan itself. If it was going to move something other than basic air (smoke, vapor, gas, whatever), I’d add a particle system to represent that, and if the substance is switchable I’d add code to do that – literally “if X == true, activate particle system” and a way to toggle X.
28 February: “Finished” Examples
Rather than make separate posts for the “finished” tower, bunker redesign, and storage tank set piece, I threw them all together in one post. I say “finished” because they’re still LOD A.
Yes, there are a lot of Chainsaw Bots hanging around. They’re not all that smart and don’t have much to do, so they spend a lot of their time loitering like juvenile delinquents. Maybe the bunker and tower are someplace even more boring than the wretched little one-pig town I grew up in.