APC Texture WIP 2

Here's a view of the retractable gun at the front, and a view of the side where the plane's crane will hook onto the APC to carry it.

APC Texture WIP

Here is my first go at the texture. I played around with several color schemes, but I eventually went back to the palette of the original concept. I'm not happy with how it looks right now. I grossly misjudged how long it would take to UV the model. Consequently, I had only about a day to do the majority of the texture work. I used Bodypaint 3D to paint on some of the textures, which saved me a lot of time for things like the worn edges and scuff marks. For some reason, all of the windows disappeared just before I rendered. I'll fix that later.

APC Finished Model

I know it's been about three weeks since my last post, but I've been very busy lately. I'll try to update this site more frequently in the future. Here are a couple of ambient occlusion renders of my finished APC model. There is quite a bit of detail that I wished I could have added, but I had to move on to the UV's and texture painting.

VTOL Crane and Canopy

I was worried about how challenging the aircraft would be to model, however, everything has come together quite quickly, and it looks better than I thought. I added a rocket pod and some missiles to the side. I also changed the cannon from a dual barrel attached to the side, to a single barrel fixed underneath. It's looks better in my opinion.

Here is a view of the crane that will pick up the APC.Nothing is smoothed yet, though.

VTOL Modeling Update

With the APC is nearly done, I decided to get started on the aircraft. My intention was to work on both vehicles at the same time, but I got carried away with APC.

I decided to have two rotating engines on either side of the plane rather than twin engines at the top and a single lift engine in the middle. It looks a lot cooler and gives makes the aircraft feel more balanced.

Getting there...

Nearly done with the APC. Here are some quick ambient occlusion renders. They look nicer than the viewport screenshots.

More APC Views

Here is a wireframe screenshot and a view of the back.

APC Turret

I ran into another problem. The spherical turret design looked okay on the concept, but not so much in 3D. It's a different shape to work with as well.

Here are some quick block outs in the hope of coming up with a better design.

I finally just winged it and came up with this. I should do that more often, but I tend to overthink everything.

Final Kowloon Alley Render

Here is the final image with the ambient occlusion layer. Check out the gallery page for a higher res image. I changed a lot for this final render, including the lighting, and added a lot more geometry in the background and on the floor, and got rid of excess geometry. I've made hundreds of minor adjustments as well. I also updated most of my 200+ materials to the mental ray architectural material. It took a while to tweak the values, but in the end these materials gave me more realistic results.

There are about 700,000 polys for this scene. I could have optimized it even further, but I ran out of time. Rendered using mental ray and importance sampling.

More Alley Screenshots

Here are a couple more.

Don't forget to look up!

And down...

Alley Viewport Screenshots

Here are some viewport screenshots of the alley so you can see the geometry. I've fixed a lot of the problems and created more objects to fill the scene.

Not sure why some of the objects are black. Must be a display glitch, I guess.

Original Kowloon Alley WIP

This scene was also created in the previous semester. We each had to create an alleyway. I was very disappointed with how this image turned out. The lighting is not very good. The scene is supposed to be in Hong Kong, yet it looks like it's in the middle of a desert. Not only that, there's nothing on the ground!

I spent too much time making the geometry look good really close up, but I was unable to render this scene with my smoothed objects due to large texture files and a ridiculous poly count. One last thing, I couldn't figure out how to fix the ambient occlusion from rendering too dark. I have since discovered that changing the "max distance" parameter to "5" solves this problem.

Here you go, but be sure to check out the new render above or on the Gallery page!

APC Modeling Update

Back to my APC. Suspension, axles, and lower hull are nearly done. I'll post close ups when all of the modeling is done.

Final Subway Render

Here is the final subway render with the ambient occlusion render layer as well. I'm very pleased with how this turned out. It is much better than the original. This scene was created with Maya 2012. It was rendered using mental ray with importance sampling.

Subway Screenshots

I've updated the subway scene and made several improvements. Here are some viewport screenshots before I post the final image.

Abandoned Subway WIP

Taking a break from my vehicle model and revisiting another project.

Here is a scene that I created in the previous semester. The objective was to make a dirty, worn-down or abandoned interior scene. At this stage it was nearly finished, but it still needed some more work.

Omni Wheels

Although I liked my design for the APC, I felt that it was a bit boring. So I had the idea to put omni directional wheels on it! This would allow the vehicle to drive perpendicular to itself and spin around quite quickly. I've only ever seen these wheels on smaller vehicles and robots, and I've no idea if this would really work. They look pretty cool, though.

Design Flaw

Oops. I completely missed the fact that my axles go right through the hull. Also, I had not really thought about suspension because you don't see it very well in most references of real APCs. Often, the hull extends outwards over the wheels and the suspension and axles are all lost in the shadow. I feel like an idiot, but now every time I look at a vehicle I think about this part.

APC Modeling Update

Time to start modeling properly. I decided to start on the APC first because I thought it would be easier!

Quick Block Outs

Here are some super quick block outs of my vehicles to get a better feel for proportion and the overall designs.

Capstone Project

Capstone is one the last animation classes in my degree program. For this class we each choose an individual topic that interests us and develop an idea for semester long project. I chose to pursue high-poly modeling and texturing. All projects must also include some kind of animation, but I'll talk more about that later.

While I choose to focus on modeling, my true passion is designing things. This topic allowed me to be a bit more creative, so I used it as an excuse to design two sci-fi vehicles which was a lot of fun.

I was required to model two vehicles, so rather than designing two completely ones, I decided to make a Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft that could transport an APC. My original intention was to have two versions for the plane, though, one that carried troops and a heavy-lift version. Due to time constraints, I eventually decided to drop the troop transport. Maybe I'll revisit this one later.

Here are the original concept designs for the VTOL aircraft and APC. The design sheets were a bit rushed and I wish that I'd had more time to fix some of the wonky perspective and to explore more design variations. I will eventually change parts of the design on both, but unfortunately I didn't have time too update these sheets.

Anyway, here you go.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I’ve been a little late updating my project progress here, so I’m just going to start from the beginning and show everything that I’ve done so far.