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...