Multibots

This has been an unclickable post for a very long time on my website, and now that I'm rewriting it with Markdown support, I wanna make this into an actual post. (Even then, this version of my website doesn't even support unclickable posts. Doesn't make sense to even have that the more I think about it.)

The main feature of multibots are attachments. That's what the side things on the head are: slots for attachments.

Stuff like arms, guns, and so on. I don't think I've ever shown a Multibot with an attachment in one of those slots on my website before...

There's also another attachment slot at the bottom of the head, as the body is also just an attachment. So, a multibot is technically just the head; everything else is external.

The torso + tracks aren't the only type of body either; here's an (older) Dabric with a humanoid body instead:

That's not all. Here's some more details about them:

Now onto everything else.

Back then (Klypank-era) I was making games. In one game, you were a robot in some facility. Here's an old and unfinished blog post about it. Later on, the game became you being some kid on a skateboard messing around outside, but that's besides the point.

The character's different in the post linked, so here's a screenshot of an earlier version of it:

It's ugly, but it was the first mention of these robots, so I have some sentimental value to it.

I then made it into a 3D model using the Three.js editor:

Later on, I made a shorter model just as a joke.

Most of the time during this period I was always trying to incorporate multibots into some sort of game. This time I was making a 3D multiplayer game with them. You had battery power, and I decided to make the eyes act as a battery indicator.

Like with most of my projects during this era, it never went anywhere. Later on, I came back wanting to again make another multiplayer game with the robots and no plan. This time, I made the robots shorter, kinda like the joke model I made earlier.

I never got past collision detection for this game.

There is one big issue with multibots at this time: there is literally no way for them to interact with the environment. No arms, just tracks. This was even mentioned in that game where multibots came from:

I was doing something with friends where I needed to come up with a character, and I used the robot. I quickly drew some arms on it:

Now I'm somewhat interested in multibots again. I think I started to come up with lore behind them around this time, because oh my god I want to make a game with them, just maybe this time with a more solid plan.

I remade them in Blockbench:

Okay, but you still can't interact with anything. So how about guns?

Later on, I added the attachment slots and made the feet slightly better. The attachments solved the interactivity issue.

They got the name "multibot" on 2021-11-01. I later removed the antenna.

I think this would quality as my persona? Anyway,

I wanted a new profile picture in Discord, so I just made a multibot with another face:

I used this model on my website in the past. This was rendered in Blender, but the model was still from Blockbench; this gave it the same material for everything.

Later on, my website's homepage featured an interactive 3D model of this, which kinda made me less happy with the model overtime. It was really rigid and like I said it only had one material. If you wanted to tilt the feet or head, they'll clip into the torso and introduce gaps:

I was dabbling with Blender somewhat, and I decided to remake multibots in it. Here, I fully rigged it, added some bendy bits so there wouldn't be any gaps or clipping, and had the model use several materials:

This model had one issue, however. When imported into Three.js, the model's edges had these small gaps:

It looked like this was to do with floating point inaccuracies in the UV, so I just ended up padding everything in the texture to account for it. It felt hacky, but I have no idea what else to do.

I feel like it might be common practice. I'm not a professional modeler by any means, but when I was ripping some models from Mario Kart they sometimes had similar padding.

However, with my model it's way more prominent due to the low-resolution of it.

Either way, gaps are gone.