My First 3D Sprite!

 Not only did I work on my 2D Sprite this weekend... But I also challenged myself to do something a little different. I also created a 3D Sprite, which floats and spins in the world I created for it! 

The sprite is based off of a little game for Windows called Platypus. In the game, you play as a red or yellow spaceship and you attack invaders. The coolest thing about the game is that it is made out of clay, which gives it a unique look! 

As you can tell, I went with the yellow ship for this project, which looks really cool fully-realized in Unreal Engine 20 years after the games' initial release. 

The background I made for this world glows, giving it a cool and futuristic look. It added some eerie lighting to the whole project too, which is really awesome! 

Here's the entire background. As you can see, it creates a cool patchwork pattern, which makes for some interesting exposure in my shots. 

You can see what I mean here, where a lot of the tiles near the bottom left are rendered in. They are emitting a glow, since I gave them emissive color properties. I raised the values a bit above normal so that it would have a photon laser look to it. 

Notice how the front panel has some transparency and emissive properties, too. This gives the cockpit a unique feel and helps grab the viewer's attention immediately.

I also gave the back of the sprite a glow to it, for the rocket booster. That way, it feels like the rocket is actually propelling through space and time! Or, at least, I think it looks cool! 

As you can tell, I gave lighting another shot and added some point lights in the background, to give this piece a laboratory look to it. I also wanted to be able to see the ship better in my shots. So there's also that! 

Here's some more trippy lighting for you, too! I think the spotlights make this look awesome. Like it's parked in the garage or landing to airdrop supplies in a hangar somewhere in space and time. I really dig the look! 

So that was my 3D project! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it! Now, this project wasn't entirely a bed of roses. In fact, I had a huge setback that I was diagnosing for over 2 hours. I made the sprite into a blueprint so that I could move it around easily... And something corrupted when compiling. I kept getting a "Static mesh can't move. Aborting" message on about 238 sprites. I couldn't edit the sprite in the blueprint mode, so I was kinda stuck. I just ended up deleting a few of the problematic pieces, which took away from the overall design but meant my animation could play.

I forgot to mention that all my problems stemmed from me trying to Transform the blueprint after setting it. I applied a simple rotation and the whole level borked. I couldn't even load my simulation without getting a wall of 238 object errors.

After deleting the 200+ problem pieces, I widdled the errors down to just 2. I still get the same error and I don't quite know what is going on, but I'm proud of myself for trying. Only one square of the whole sprite doesn't animate- the front panel close to the nose. It actually sticks to the origin while the rest of the sprite floats. A small loss, but one I was willing to take after 2 hours on the Unreal forums with not much progress as to diagnosing the issue.

If anyone knows the root of the problem, I would be happy to learn more about it! I need all the help I can get! I'm still not deterred, though. In fact, I'm more determined than ever to make great games. No bugs or errors are going to stop me this time! 

I'll probably work more with the Sequencer and Animations in Maya next, so expect to see plenty of blogs about those topics. 

Thanks for checking out my work again! I hope you stick around and see what I'm doing next!