Texturing Robotnik's Egg Pod in Substance
0This time I captured every session of texturing for the creation of Robotnik's Egg Pod (Egg Mobile). From start to finish what is shown here is 10x playback speed of a little over a weeks worth of texture work wrapped up into a very long, boring 4 hour video. I don't recommend watching the whole thing unless you are just THAT interested, it is just meant for documentation purposes, how ever I do make some strange unorthodox usage of displacements, warp projection textures, and anchor point reference tricks. Roughly 42.6 hours of work which technically could be a work week plus worth of seat time started on November 15th 2022 until yesterday. I didn't want to do a lot of hand modeling or any kit-bashing at all, so much of the detail for this vehicle had to be picked up on the texture side. There is so much surface area that two 4K textures wont get the best resolution, texel densities are sitting around 7-9 pix/unit on a 4K 0-1 UV layout roughly. I was too lazy to bother doing visual label decals or differed decals this go round. I plan to add a multi channel detail normal map to it once in unreal but as this thing is mainly going to be used in making an animated short I was not super concerned with texture fidelity. This is def not an asset meant for like a first person action, or close camera game etc.
The general shape and feel of THIS version of his egg pod is loosely based on the silhouette and features of the base and laser equipped Egg Pod from the original Sonic CD game. Because I decided to give Robotnik a physics enabled cape I had concerns about keeping the original large jet engine behind his head design. We could reasonably assume his cape would get snatched up into the inlet and that would be game over for him.
Because of this unforeseen design flaw I took some liberties on the industrial mechanics of the thing by trading some fossil fuel driven stuff for electrical alternative energy. For the central main fuselage I have moved the primary fuel based jet engine to here. In place of the jet engine up top alternative energy has been used there instead to power the side mounted ionic hover stabilizers and high powered ground laser cannon on the bottom. What type of alternative energy you may ask. No not hydrogen or solar but... Quartz. Yes, mineral power; Not feasible tech but I thought it could be interesting to explain why Quartz Quadrant, one of the levels before Stardust Speedway would manifest a bad future were Robotnik has been mining/hoarding the heck out of the planet's resources of this precious gem. In Quartz Quadrant present you see plenty of the gems laying around, BUT in Quartz Quadrant bad future most if not all of the background gems are gone and most of the scene has devolved into some kind of mining processing refineries with chemical vats and smoke stacks everywhere.
There are studies that show Quartz has electrical properties. It can produce electrical discharge when bent or compressed. Here we can imagine perhaps a battery electrical or combustion initiated impulse that could jump start a sustainable chain reaction to keep this vehicle's hovering stable while relying on jet propulsion for rapid forward motion. In real life there is no such sustainable reaction but I thought it would be an interesting spin to have a vehicle run off an energy source we don't see often just to play up the possibilities of science fiction and add a little more to the allure of Robotnik really being a true mad scientist.
**Note, I did good the music loop - no time to redo the vid and re upload.
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