Jr.Who - W.I.P. - Assault Mech
 

Hey guys,

I just got back from my weekend vacation yesterday. This is my first W.I.P. that I’ve put up on this site. For a while, I’m just going to put up screen grabs, but when I get to texturing, I’ll be doing some good renders.

I’ve been working on it for about 2 hours.

-Jr.Who
:beer:

Another 40 minutes of work:

Another 55 minutes of work done today. Sorry that I forgot to post them as wires:

looking pretty neat so far!

Thanks, Mike!
:beer:

40 minutes of work on it today. I still have some tweaking to do on it, but I’ll do that tomorrow.

Nice and tidy so far ..ramp it up now and see what you can do in 38 minutes :)

Thanks, jsprogg. I’m trying to keep it as tidy as I can, without getting too far from what Kurt’s doing (because if I’m having the same problems as him, I want to know how to fix that problem).

I forgot to say that 10-15 minutes of that time is watching the tutorial (because of the amazing fast-forward button in QT ;) ).

I spent about 25 minutes on my own, and then 50 with the tut, so about an hour and 15 minutes total today.

I still have a little work to do with the mesh, and I have to add a lot more things (after the last part of the tut) to it.

Very nice and fast work !

Nice details man! i love it.

Thanks. I’m actually going quite slow! I’ve been busy this week, so I couldn’t do as much as I wanted to.

Thanks. I’m hoping that when I’m done modeling it, there will be a ton more detail to it. There’s also texturing…… ;)

Anyway, I‘ve been working on it really slow today (being a Sunday and football season just started :p ). I’m going to try to get it all finished up tomorrow, so I can post the HD render on my site.
:beer:

Well, I got about 30 minutes done yesterday, and about 2 and a half hours done today. Most of what I did today was messing around with the mesh, going back, and forth, seeing which looks better. I’ve still got a little bit of work to do on it, and I’ll finish it all up tomorrow.

Very nice ...

Whats the poly count so far?

Thanks, marlonjohn!

The poly count is at 24674 faces right now. Yesterday when I did that edge work, I tried to get rid of as many as I could.

Today I’m going to try finishing it up by working on the mesh of the main guns, and I’m going to try to create 1 or 2 other weapons. I might do some other work on the mesh, but I don’t know.

OK, I spent about 3 more hours on it today, cleaning up the mesh on the main gun, and creating 2 other weapons (the missile launcher on top and the gatling guns). It’s at 35206 faces now.

Now, I just have to set it up for a render, smooth everything out, and render it!

very nice man, i can't wait to see this one textured!!!

OK, I’m finished with the modeling! If you look on my site, you‘ll find the HD pic (which I would highly recommend doing).

Special thanks for this project go to iTunes, Dean Martin, The Godfather soundtrack, and the Letters From Iwo Jima soundtrack for keeping me alive while I was modeling by myself. ;)

C&C welcome!

Now, on to the texturing……

-Jr.Who
:beer:

I just started the UV mapping on it today. It took me an hour and a half to map the main body part (my mesh is more dense than Kurt‘s). Tomorrow I’m going to clean up the UVs on it.

I did another hour of work, moving (some of) the UVs around, and I had to remap some of the UVs. I think tomorrow I’ll have all the UVs cleaned up, and possibly sewed (since I’m following the tuts).
:beer:

Theres a bit of stretching that I would clean up like on the sides that have been extruded out its stretched at those points.

Yeah, I’m gonna try to fix that. Most of the work I did yesterday was moving the front, top, and bottom UVs into position.

nice work!! is it for a game or just fun?

Thanks, DocMAX!

It’s pretty much for experience and my portfolio.
:beer:

are you going to make an animation? rigging?

Maybe. I tried rigging a character (organic) before this project, and that failed miserably, but I’m going to try to find some tuts for rigging this.

on mechanical rigs you have to parent the parts directly to the joints...

OK, now I have a big question. In my scene, I have all of my objects as polys. In the tut, kurt Kurt converts some stuff to NURBS, so he doesn’t have to UV map them. I always thought that polys were better, so which should I do?

pretty much depends on preference, in my opinion. I like polys all the way.

As mike said, its all personal prefference, I would go polys, that way you have total control, with the cost of having to uv map it though!

Thanks, guys. I’m going to try to get more work done on it today (a couple of things popped up over the last couple of days).

Hey looking really nice especially the way the mesh flows! looking forward to seeing it textured.

converting to nurbs can be good for avoiding the time needed to UV map but have you tried projection mapping? Especially for some of the smaller parts, I think you'll get some nice results from building your shading network up in the hypershade using layer textures and projections (set to triPlanar) and if needed you can always convert to a file texture if render time (reading all those nodes) becomes an issue. Its not everyones prefered technique but it works well in some cases :)

Keep it up

J.

Hi there
 

Nice work.
Last year I took the same tut. That was then my first ever model.
Never got to texture it, seen the busy workflow here at the office.
Rendered some occlusions, for me that is always the coolest :-)
Here are some pics of what I came up with.
in the end it always comes down to personalisation

Anyhow, can't wait to see it renderen

Keep up the good work.
If you're going to rig it and animate.... That would be awesome!!

GR
M

And...
 

...the front side.
:)

Hope you like it!

The modeling is perfect! no comments there!!!

However, and this is just a minor issue offcourse, the gatlings will always be pointed in the same direction as the big guns.
Due to their placement their rotation circle is very small.

If a target could be taken out by the gatlings, you wouldnt need the big guns, and if a target was to be taken out by the big guns, chances are the gatlings are not very effective against it.

A little suggestion, please take no offence, replace the gatlings with missile racks, and mount the gatlings underneath the torso on a turret.

That way the gatlings can sweep out the lighter units in front of the mech, while the big guns are aimed at that enemy armor, with missiles ready if it should prove insufficient.

Thanks, cut_the_krab. Nice model, I really like those fans in the back. I don’t know if I’ll animate it, but I’ll try my best to rig it.
:beer:

Thanks, DDSilver. I have 2 comebacks for you:
1. What happens when the big guns run out of ammo?
2. Who the crap wouldn’t want gatling guns?

Anyway, almost another hour and a half of work. My schedule‘s been going crazy with school, some yard work for someone, etc., and I hope to finish texturing this by the deadline I made myself (October 2).

First, here’s a pic of the UVs for the main part:

Here’s a pic of the work I did today. I almost have all of the leg done.

And here’s the UVs for the leg:

Well, its not that I comment on having gatling guns, its their location ;)

And what happens when the big guns run out of ammo? someone at supplies will get fired I wager ;)

If you look at Modern day heavy armor, you will see that their light weapons can move completely independant from the main gun. They can point in the same direction but dont have to...

Military vehicels are a hobby of mine... I guess thats why it just looked a little odd to me.

Within the past 2 days I’ve gotten almost 3 hours of work done on it. This is reminding me how much I suck at UV mapping……

Anyway, I’ll just post all the UV snapshots and stuff when I’m completely finished with it. I’ve only got a couple more things left to map.

Here’s a pic of all the things that are mapped:

it looks like youve still got a bit of stretching on the main body on the extruded bits, it probably wont matter unless your going to make a rusted look to it.

I probably would planar map the whole extrude then select the UV's then scale them up to match.