This is a personal project where I modeled and textured a futuristic laptop. I wanted it to look a bit roughed up, well used and have many moving widgets on the many screens!
This project started when i found this Sci-fi Military Rugged Laptop by neatpolygons on Sketchfab. When I saw it I immediately thought that it would look extremly cool with animated widgets, so I set up to create my own version. As you can see my model is inspired by the original, but has it’s own identity!
After modeling it in Maya I textured it in Substance Painter. After exporting the textures the materials was assembled in Unreal Engine 5. Then I build a simple showroom level for it using assets by JessyStorm’s Modular Sci-Fi pack, lit the scene, created camera movement sequences and rendered.
The asset is using two main materials, one for the laptop and one for the screens. The screen material is then using an UMG widget as render target to feed a texture parameter:
The UMG widget itself has a single looping animation and loads of smaller widgets that uses their own materials and logic to create movements. For instance, there’s a “heat” widget that simply randoms between adding -1, 0 and 1 every second and feeds the value to a circular progress material:
I had some problems when rendering the Unreal clips as you can see in the video! I could not find any good way to let the clock(s) stay correct. This is because the widget is running on a set timer and updates the time every second. That means that if the render takes longer than a second to render 60 frames, it will update too slow. If I set it to work on tick instead, the clock will move too fast. If anyone can come up with a smart solution to this problem, please let me know! More importantly, everything looks correct in real time which after all was my main goal!
