I am very very new to blender and have been trying to teach myself the basics for the last few weeks due to my university project. I have been tasked with developing an AI using matlab and then simulating it on a hexapod. My supervisor suggested I look into game engines as a way of implementing the simulation and I decided to use Unreal Engine 4. After creating the environment and the main simulation I realised I would need an animated model of a hexapod. I acquired a free license model of a cube robot with 6 legs and honestly did not anticipate how complicated the process is!
I do not know where to start, after reading loads of tutorials and reading guides I could not work out what I was doing with this model. All I need is an idle animation and a walking animation and then I can import it into my project hopefully. This is not exactly what I had in mind when I chose to do this project and I would quite like to start actually writing the matlab stuff but I cannot move my project forward until I have at least a simulation working.
If anyone can offer any form of help on animating the robot or even for importing it into unreal engine 4 it would be wonderful!
Thankyou for reading!
Robot.blend (6.86 MB)
ATTACHED FILE^^
I believe it is already rigged.
The model itself doesn’t look too awful. (Ok, it does need some cleanup of overlapping edges and ngons, but they don’t show unless smoothed. May be a few shading artifacts depending on how its rendered too.)
Now onto the rig… For stuff like NLA to work (or at least easily) it needs all legs on a common rig (there is more than one armature on the model at the moment), and needs some more constraints to restrict movement of the hinged joints. All bones for a given model should be in a single armature. For ease of animation I’d also suggest a “root” bone (only used for positioning) and a bone for the body. Those things give flexibility when using animation tools like IK that make the process easier. Also seems to be discrepancy between object and edit space on some bones, which may make things trickier to fix too. (Trying to join stuff or fix the existing rig it goes a bit haywire. The typical trick of applying rotation & scale results in the same.) I’m not quite good enough at rigging to figure that one out, may be easier to go to square 1 and re-rig from scratch.
At least you did good on naming everything. It’s so easy to be lazy about that. (I know I’ve been guilty at times.)
Haven’t had much work with games, so I don’t know much about conversion to UE4 - sorry.
I suspect you didn’t get much in the way of replies until now, as most 3D artists are hesitant to do other people’s homework. But I hope those pointers aren’t too late for you to figure it out.