Strat Configurator
The Project
Beeing a guitar nerd I wanted to create a configurator with parts that exists in the real world. Guitarbuilders like myself often wonder what an instrument would look like in a different color, with different woods and layouts.
Challenges & Solutions: Modeling
Finding CADs for the parts was the easy part, making them look good was a bigger job. This involved tesselation in FreeCAD, converting to gitf in order to continue tweaking in Blender and then to fbx for final arrival in Unreal. By assembling in Blender, I could control pivot points and rotate parts like knobs and whammy bar to make the guitar look more realistic. It also gave me full control of scale and positioning.
Challenges & Solutions: UI & Code
In Unreal the challenge was to build a UI that served to give lots of combinations while beeing simplistic and looking good. The color map is adapted from a major guitar makers 60's color chart, and the ideas of having matte, metallic and translucent variations are mine. The system of parts started out as an array in which every part can be switched to an alternative. After some time I found this didn't really speed up the programming process so I continued programming parts individually. In it's current state the explode function is handeled by an array while most variations are handled by hard coding the parts. Next step is to use data assets in order to make the configurator more flexible with different guitar bodies etc.
