THE ARMY - Darkware
 

No images yet. Just reserving my place. I'll be modeling the South African Rooivalk Attack Helicopter. Here's what it really looks like -

http://www.army-technology.com/proje...rooivalk1.html

I almost decided upon the USA's RAH-66 Comanche Reconnaissance Attack Helicopter, which has a nice look to it, but I like the twin cockpit idea better.

NICE!!! looking forward to this one much! and thx for joining in Darkware

I just love helicopters Darkware! This is great!

killer coper i love the apaches :D

So far, I am not pleased with what I've done, but oh well. Nurbs would have been so much easier to work with for the smooth, round parts, which I am having trouble with (illistrated in the last image) but I decided from the start that I wanted this to be strictly polys for practice purposes.

Great start. Just keep at it and you'll get there :)

yeh taking the shape nice start

hey good start darkware! keep it up!

update

wow that looks really starting to look nice!! Love the landing gear! Great work. Can't wait to see more.

looking good there mate!! just stick with it!!! It will get there

You certainly have improved! Great work!

holy cow... I remember some of the work you showed when you first joined here and now look at ya !:eek: :)
you seem to be picking up maya rather well! great work dude

Great work so far Darkware. You said you were having trouble with the chunkyness on the smooth parts... try selecting the 'chunky' faces and boosting their normals to 180degrees smoothing.

Thanks for the comments everyone. Here's an update, but I still have a ways to go. I'll be doing some minor tweaks here and there next. I need to modify the tail a bit, adding some stuff to it and possibly smoothing it out some more, create the third wheel that goes near the back of the helicopter, and obviously texture it.

JB - Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that. If I try to use Polygons>Smooth on any part of the plane, I get those ugly black streaks that most modelers have seen at least once or twice in their time. This is obviously because the entire base of the plane is made out of one single polygonal plane. Modifying the normals won't work here, or if they will work, I don't have the knowledge to do it myself. As you can see however, the blocky faces you were refering to are now smoothed. I found a way to do it.

You select the faces you want to smooth, extract them, but don't move them at all, combine all faces into one object, merge all vertices, smooth, combine the object with the base of the plane again so it is one object as it was before, then merge the vertices to make it complete. This eliminates any black streaks I might get using the regular method of smoothing.

EDIT* forgot to upload the image. Crap you can't do that when you edit.

update.

And to see a polygon helo. I must say it still look pretty good (*sniff* I prefer nurbs :) )

How much is left to model Darkware?

I'm close to being done with the exterior. I really just need to add a few more things to the tail, a third wheel, and do some minor tweaking here and there. I don't really think there is much more I can do with the exterior, though. I am thinking about doing some interior work now, too. Add a seat, some controls, a few cupholders lol. Texturing will be the last thing I do, though seeing as how I hate it.

Well, I just went through everything and did some cleaning up and organising. Every object has a proper name now, unnessisary faces have been deleted, and all objects have been placed into a group called "Rooivalk_Attack_Helicopter." I feel really good about it now that everything is in order.

Since there are eight missiles, each one at 560 faces each, I decided to instance copy 7 to reduce the file size. (I wonder if it made a difference.) I can instance copy one of the wings, one of the missile holders, and a few other small things, but is it worth it for a smaller file size? Doing this means that you can't modify vertices of individual missiles or the wings correctly in animation for say, a fantastic crash and boom animation. What should I do?

Alright. Last thing. Based on the images you've seen, how many faces do you think the entire plane has right now? The person with the closest answer wins a free pat on the back!

Wow. I just did a little test. I duplicated a poly sphere 20 times with true copies bringing hte total face count up to 8400. The file size turned out to be 624 kb I believe. I then deleted all 20 true copies and made 20 instanced copies. 8400 faces just like the last one, but the file size was only 44 kb. I deleted all copies leaving just the single sphere and the file size came out to be 43 kb. Needless to say, I will deffinetly be using instanced copies for this helicopter unless someone gives me a legitamate reason not to.

I did the same thing with nurbs spheres as well. When duplicating, the file size for true copies was about half as large as the file with poly spheres. I've always wanted to know how much the file sizes were effected by all these things.

Hey, thats very interesting!!! I dare not try it before I know of any backsides, but please inform me if you come about some.

About your helicopter.
I'd guess about 10 thousand faces Darware!

Seeing as how undseth is the only one who guessed, he wins! lol. 19, 220 is the correct answer, though. Each missile is 560 faces and the base alone is around 4000 I believe. Then you include the wheels, and other odds and ends. Anyway, I am FINALLY finished with smoothing this thing! It has taken me forever. I feel like ripping Polygon>Smooth right out of Maya. I also decided to go ahead and texture the exterior since I am a little tired of modeling at the moment. I literally have hours upon hours to work on this thing since school is out for four days straight from sickness problems. I'm predicting that I'll have this thing done faster than I first thought.....

Update.

I like especially the landing gear :) Details... must... like emmm..

Thanks to Mike's tutorial on render globals, I have finally learned how to make files into AVI or MPEGs and zip them so that you all can see my animations! This is my very first one. It's a simple 360 degree shot of the helicopter. (439 kb download) It's 62 frames and was rendered in Maya as Jpegs for small file sizes. Sorry about the resolution. AVI would have been so much better, but it was a wopping 3 megabites! Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Looks good but now my head is spinning :D

Great job on it!

-Emo

Noce work there, but I think the tail boom is to high.. If you look at the reference picture you linked to... You'll see that the exhaust gate from the jet is in line with the top of the tail boom, but on the model, the tail boom is much higher, and the exhaust is below the top of the tail boom...

hey thats great darkware!!!

nice :)

NIce Job Dark!!!!!!

Very kewl!

- FINAL RENDER -

Well, I really don't have any good images of the interior, you wouldn't see much of the detail if I stuck it in there, and since my power went out a few days ago and it's near the end of the month, I don't have a lot of time to work on anything. So, I have decided to leave the helicopter as it is without the interior. I finally found some time to model the back wheel, the back blades, and do some minor touch-ups, so I'm calling it complete now. Thankfully, I have already named all objects in the scene, named the textures, and completely organized everything in the Outliner just in case I happen to win. It would be a nightmare if I had to do all that now! The image below is the final render.

- FINAL RENDER -

By the way, thanks for all the comments. DukerX - I used that reference image for the basic design, but combined the look of a few other helicopters I saw. I included Hellfire missiles, which are not usually equiped to such a helicopter, made the tail boom slanted, created slightly different blades, and like you said, repositioned the exhaust. I figured I would let myself go with the flow and be a little creative this time. Thanks for noticing, though. You were obviously paying close attention, which is a good thing. :-)

Great job Darkware! Is that your final pic? I hope to get back on my model by the end of the week, gives me some time to do the rotor and final details. Good work!
BRian

look s good darkware, nice to see one completed ;)