Railguns FTW

Finished my first run at crafting some railguns.  After a day's worth of work, I've got the dang things attached!  Also, I've now figured out a workflow for quickly having left/right versions of a weapon, notice they aren't symmetrical.  I think I'm going to bring the mount points in towards the center of the mech more, it looks a little wide-stanced at the moment.  The slide is also animated when firing.  I've put together an energy particle beam emitter for the shot, but I'm not happy with it and am going back to work.

Toying with Maya LT - Sticking with Blender

So, I've been working in Maya LT 2016 a bit since Autodesk has offered a 3 year student license and I've been frustrated by the workflow from Blender to UE4.  Namely, I couldn't get anything to import properly even after following multiple posts on forums and watching Epic's video on using Blender for UE4.  Everything was importing jacked up.  Even when I had my model coming in properly, the physics asset was completely wrong, etc.  Sockets were attaching at enormous proportions.

After getting Maya LT to properly import into UE4, with about 10% of the asspain that Blender has been, I briefly decided that maybe I'd make the switch to Maya LT full time.

After playing around with it some, I changed my mind.  Two reasons.  The first being that after playing with Maya's import settings, I got some ideas for Blender's import settings...and found a solution that works.  Yay, because I love Blender.  The key was scale of .01 for scene units and ASCII export at scale 1.0.

Secondly, Maya just feels a lot like 3DS Max did...inefficient.  And it's the controls.  Whereas the seemingly impossible task of getting my work into UE4 with Blender was making the tradeoff worth it, it simply wasn't the case once I figured that out.

It's clear that Maya is just as capable and powerful as Blender, moreso probably, even using the LT version.  I like the cleanliness of the interface and the hotbox.  The problem is that it makes everything that's simple in Blender is so damn difficult in comparison in Autodesk's products.  And trust me, I WANT to use the industry standard..but not when I feel like I'm running a race with a pulled hamstring.  I'm going to make it to the finish line, but it's going to take me longer.

For instance, having to use the manipulator really irritates me.  At first, Blender's system of pressing keys seemed, a little archaic in a system that's used to design visual creation, but I quickly realized how efficient it was to hit A to select all, S to scale and type in 100 on the keypad and press enter to lock in.  This is a lot more tedious in Maya.

Also, the most useful tools in Blender are a simple keystroke away.  Extrude, bevel, edge loops that auto multiply and snap etc.  In Maya, some of these are somewhat easy to use, but you have to interact with the interface a LOT more in order to use them.

Mirroring seems way easier in Blender.  I bring in an object, delete one half, apply a mirror modifier and then edit away instantly.  In Maya, even getting the object cut it half and put on the axis line was painful.  I had to bring in a cube, size it, select the edge vertices, set their position to 0 manually, etc.  God forbid you want to change anything once you've mirrored it.

I'm going to continue to use both products, mainly to get some experience with Maya.  I'm hoping that eventually its what seems to be less intuitive control systems start to become more logical to me.  I've read that it's animation and rigging system is superior, so worst case I can model in Blender and animate in Maya, but I'd really like to get experience in both products with the whole workflow.

Further Work on Heavy Scorpion Mech

Little bit more work on this today.  Did some cutting of excessive polygons and expanded upon some shape.  Went ahead and built the basic rig for it, but it's not properly set up yet for animation.  Will likely wait for a day when I'm really motivated to get the skeleton setup up with Inverse Kinematics and such.

Haven't figured out where I want the anti-aircraft missile batteries to go yet.

Spitballing for the Heavy Mech

The heavy mech in my game will be a defensive role mech.  Thinking of going with a scorpion look to it.  Started work on it a little bit today.  This mech will considerably larger than a medium, and will have some armor plates slapped on it at some point.

Has a weapon mount underneath for a railgun, on the tip of the tail, and two mounts on the top of the fuselage.  Will also be able to deploy mines.

UE4 Mech Movement and Controls Progress