Friday 14 April 2017

Wibble Wobble Jellyfish on a plate!

We're coming up to the 2017 Robot Wars series Grand Final in a few days and I recently saw one of this years competitors Dave Lawrie was retiring from the hobby due to being rejected for the next series. You can find the full post here, but long story short he is having to dismantle his robot 'Jellyfish' and distancing himself from the sport.

I felt for the guy, and decided that I wanted to immortalise Jellyfish of some sorts, so what better way than to model it? No CAD was used to make the actual Jellyfish so I thought he might appreciate a fan made digital recreation!


I sent Dave a few images of the renders and a small message that included a brief description of what I am doing with this project and was surprised to receive a response, and quite a flattering one at that!



He gave me permission to actually have Jellyfish officially in the game! Of course this meant I had to improve the model I spent a few hours producing, adding extra details and tweaking the scale of a few features such as the pipes.


Then it was a simple matter of implementing the bot into the game like any other robot I've made before. I had to make a brand new script for Jelly's weapon, which is an actuated grabber claw designed to pin and hold robots.




I'm going to film a few bits showing Jelly in action and send them to Dave, most likely updating this post when I do. Thanks for letting me have such an awesome interaction with a roboteer and giving me permission to create Jellyfish for the game Dave!

EDIT: Jellyfish in action!