Cool, its looking great. Makes me want to drive it :)
Have you much to go before texturing?

not too much left
 

I dont think there is too much left to do now before texturing, just some detailing in the dashboard. Im sure a lot of detailing could be done with texturing but I'm not very confident at texturing and am avoiding it as much as possible. In all honesty I have no idea where to start when it comes to texturing the tank.

Any help would be great!

The other thing to be thinking about now is rigging for animation, single components all work now (arms moving, guns raising, tracks turning etc...) but there are so many components they don't move together. I had a quick go at grouping it all and everything except the tracks moved together but they went at a different speed, why??? They are lots of small polygon shapes attached to a curve and deformed by a lattice, if that helps!

Thanks for your help.

Oh, and I added a nose gun I saw in one episode!

The models coming along nicely, i still have my toy thundertank :)

dashboard
 

I've done a little more on the dashboard but don't know what to do now.

I'm not sure what texturing it really needs or how to do it!

And don't know how to rig it so the bits don't all fly apart! Does it all need to be polygons or Nurbs instead of a mixture? Do they need to be grouped? Or parented? or what? Why do my track fly out of shape when I move them?

Help would be great!

Cheers everyone

I'm a noob with rigging so cant really help there :(

Texturing-wise it'd be nice to see the dashboards with things on the screens etc... As for the general body, maybe look into playing with shaders like people do with cars (not that I can help there either)

Looking great though :)

texture issues
 

Could anyone help explain the strange distorting of this texture I have applied to one segment of my tracks?

Next to it is the texture applied to a primitive cube, as it should look.

The history has been deleted on the track segment if that ,akes any difference.

Cheers

Have you laid out the UV's properly?

Yep, looks like you need to start figuring out how to lay out UVs.
Have a look into planar, cylindrical and spherical mapping. Your model is fairly angular so you might be able to UV map a lot of it with simple planar mapping.

Would be easier to automap in my opinion. Shure it's a bit time confusing but you wont ever have to worry about straighten out the UV's. You will also have more control over your textures with automatic mapping. This is just a suggestion.

cheers
 

Thanks for your comments on what is wrong and how to solve the problem. I really know very little about texturing and think i may have to do a couple of tutorials or something.

I played around with different kinds of projection mapping, i.e. planar, spherical etc... and they didn't seem to make any difference to the strange distortions. I was just fiddling with settings thoug, not really sure what i was doing!

How do I set it to automatic mapping if i was to try that?

Ben

Good and clean geometry, congratulations, Now the texturing part is a pain in the ass as well, althouhgt this isn´t an complex organic model.

Im not so good texturing but try diferent ways to aplly the texture, such as plannar, spherical....

GOOD LUCK

I didin't mean to say time confusing, sorry. I meant to say time consuming, heh. There is a trick to using Auto mapping. Auto mapping itself will get you started but you have to sew the pieces together. To automap, go to your texture tab in your edit polygons menue and scroll down to automapping. Select your model first then select automapping. Your model and all of it's pieces will be shown in the UV texture editor. To make the process easier, extract the geometry you want to texture seperately. Visit http://www.mtmckinley.net/ and go to the tutorials, and go to the modeling secion. In the modeling section, look for a tutorial on poly texturing. It's a video tutorial, and it explains how to use automapping. It's a really great tutorial. It should help you out.

New Mental Ray 'Cake' effect!
 

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I have been busy getting stuff packed up as I am moving out of my flat.

Now, I should be pretty ashamed for posting this, but I thought you might like to see it anyway! It was my birthday last Wednesday and my Mum baked a Thundercake to make up for never buying me a toy tank when I was younger!!!

Also, thank you everyone for helping with my texturing problem. I decided to follow THX1138's instruction and now the tracks look just as I wanted. Well, kinda! I didn't really put much thought into the choice of texture, what do people think of it?

I will try and do some more work tonight and update you all soon.

tracks
 

textured

Re: New Mental Ray 'Cake' effect!
 

Thats one of the sweetest things I've heard in a long time. Happy birthday!

Awsome looking tank treads if I must say so! You gotta model some thundercats to go with the thunder tank after you have finished it. ;)

Very cool cake, happy birth day!

hehe, cool cake. I like the sweets inside the tank tracks :)
Did you help by giving your mum your reference material? ;)
Give her a slap on the back for a job well done and get her into maya too.

The tracks look cool, it makes a difference with the texture.

Textures
 

I've started doing some texturing and have tried adding its glass roof.

Let me know what you think!

the new additions are looking good :)
its definately making a difference adding the textures

Am I nearly finished?
 

I haven't been able to do any more work on this for a while because I have been away from home. I'm not going to have much more time before going away for 5 months, so, I need to prioritise any more work I do.

Can anyone see problems? Or have any ideas for additions? Better textures anywhere?

C+C please.

think about dirtying it up as if its just been out saving the thundercats :)
the nose is a bit too shiny as well

As far as I can go right now
 

Well, as much as I would love to continue working on my tank I don't have the time now as I'm leaving the country for 5 months!

So, here are a few views of my tank as it is. I am also going to post it in Finished Work as nothing more will be done till I get back in March.

Thanks for all your comments and help.

[Mod edit]

please go Here to see the finished project

Remember me?
 

Hello all,

I have just recently returned from 5 months travelling around the world with my girlfriend so havent touched this model until now.

The other day I got all the moveable bit animated and recorded a quick playblast to show what it can do. The link is below. (please excuse the awful camera work, have never moved a camera before!)

Hopefully I will have time now to start getting the whole tank moving around, I was thinking of trying to composite it onto a real road eventually, it will need someone to drive it though!

Let me know what you think.

Ben

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdIJ2LOD_jE

Ha ha! Excellent model ben and a great choice. Well done! :beer:

And I hope you had a good trip around the world!

blimey is it 5 months ago that you stopped work on this model?? time flies!
welcome back and the animation is cool though like you say, maybe some work on the camera is needed :)

Animating
 

Hello,

Thank you for your kind words, I should look up some tutorials on camera animation as I don't know much about it. Now on to animating as a whole!

If you saw the playblast I posted before then you would have seen that the tracks are set up to rotate around the wheels. Does anyone have any suggestions as to getting the wheels to spin within the tracks and in line with the tank as a whole moving?

If you have any hints on animating a vehicle at all I would be very grateful, I am eager to get this thing moving now.

Ben