The next step was rigging, this turned out to be quite challenging because I'm not very experienced in rigging characters. At first, I was confused at how to approach this but soon figured out how to use bones in 3ds max to create my own bone structure.
The process proved difficult as I didn't realise that that the pivot had to be straight or I would get off place rotation on those joints, I found this out only after applying the skin modifier and weights, near the end the process, I also didn't realised that some of my joints were more ovular than cylindrical and this became obviously flawed when applying animation . I managed to deal with this issue because the model was static so I didn't have to animate it, only pose it.
The next problem I encountered was exporting the mesh into UE4 whilst keeping it's pose, It would keep resetting the pose to the default look. To fix this, I made a copy of the mesh, collapsed the skin modifier and used the posed model as a static mesh.
Texturing came easy to me this time round, it was an absolute pleasure with substance painter and I managed to make all my materials PBR based.
Somehow, despite all the unexpected setbacks I found myself on schedule and with enough time to do a little extra work on the project. I realised that the model and it's pose would really be enhanced if I gave it a small setting. To give the model that little bit extra, I quickly modelled, unwrapped and textured a small setting of a diner floor and even gave it an additional asset of a traditional American milkshake to make it look like the robot is on it's way to a customers table.
My final task was to add some flair in UE4, I decided to animate the little propellers on the back of the model to make it feel a little more alive.
