Thank you @Kanni3d, it's been a good lesson. I chose this heli specifically because it'd push advanced modeling and texturing skills. it's been fun learning about aircraft too.
I didn't use Zbrush on this project, @AlirezaMorgan. High poly was made in Maya with lumpy areas remodeled with the Hard Mesh plugin later. Smoothing groups in Max, bakes/textures in Substance Painter, and renders in Toolbag.
Edited the geometry to use FWN and rebake since I was already cleaning up shading seams. More material work, lots of refinement. About 3 more major texturing tasks to do.
The main body and turret sections are now using FWN. didn't bother doing the rest given how little of an improvement it made. Just something I wanted to practice for work
here's some better shots with rimlights and proper compression. This would be a great time for texturing critiques if you have any. Glass is hidden btw
This looks great! Though I'd love to see an AO pass to occlude the rim lighting, and to give a bit of self-shadowing. The connections are looking a bit floaty.
thanks a bunch! disabled shadows from the rim lights since I thought it looked cool, but you're totally right. That with some extra attention to the AO should help bring the pieces together.
After addressing tons of feedback and pushing the materials, I'm happy to have reached a point where I can call this project complete.
Retrospective: I started this project over 2 years ago with a handful of goals in mind. I wanted to level-up hard surface, vehicle, and texturing skills. Progress had to be set aside during periods of crunch, job hunts, and other life-related inconveniences. I sometimes worried this made me look slow or lazy to other artists. Starting something fun and new was always tempting. In the end, the goals that were set here were achieved. Now I'm looking forward to smaller stuff for a while.
Sometimes life forces our art to take a back seat, and it shows great determination and drive to finish a project like this when so many times you could've just set it aside and done something else. Try not to worry too much what others think and enjoy your hard work. Besides, it shows grit, not laziness to finish off a long project like this. So, bravo! Thank you for sharing this awesome vehicle
trying not to get caught up on the dates from early WIPs. Certainly not ignorant to the pace of this industry so there's a feeling of "too late" that's hard to shake off. At the same time, I'm trying to do like you said and just enjoy the process. Prioritize the right kind of things. Learned a bunch, either way
Really well done finishing this! its a great piece of work especially the modelling, would be fun to see it with strong daytime lighting as well but I'm sure you're probably done with this for good now! sometimes its a relief to just finish a project! it came out really well and I bet you learned loads!
thanks! yeah, I'm not messing with the lighting any more. Have been noodling with some animation tho. a little hover idle. Would have posted it by now but the rotor blades look gross when they spin without any kind of motion blur in marmoset. Thinking of a solution..
Came back to this in order to take a breather on another personal project. Currently animating a hover idle. Motion looks okay but the rotor blades still look off. I've done research and crazy math to try and replicate the film look but I'm apparently missing something. I can smear the blades and add motion blur but that won't change the way they spin.
I want something like this -
Has anyone here done an effect similar to this and/or could share relevant tips to get a nice flashy look for the rotor?
figured out the RPM vs FPS math, smeared the rotor blades, and added AE pixel blur to mimic motion blur. That still didn't look good so I animated the blades to instead spin backwards since footage of helicopters appear that way. Amounts to a decent result.
Feels like it could use small bits of fx and some parallax motion to the backdrop but I'm thinking I should set this down and get back to my maglev racer. anyone have input?
Nice job on it! A quick thing I spotted is the key points when the animation loops, the Jigabachi does a smooth end curve and makes the looping anim look a little odd instead of a continuous swaying motion. Other than that awesome job on sticking on this for so long!
ah, see what you mean. I intentionally made the hover kind of sway a bit from a controlled hover until corrected, but you're right, it settles too much and makes the loop look odd. thank you!
Replies
Thank you @splicer! The design is one of my favorite mechs in GITS. The refueling chopper looks awesome too but there's not much reference available
I'm interested in knowing how you implemented zbrush to your pipeline
I didn't use Zbrush on this project, @AlirezaMorgan. High poly was made in Maya with lumpy areas remodeled with the Hard Mesh plugin later. Smoothing groups in Max, bakes/textures in Substance Painter, and renders in Toolbag.
Retrospective:
I started this project over 2 years ago with a handful of goals in mind. I wanted to level-up hard surface, vehicle, and texturing skills. Progress had to be set aside during periods of crunch, job hunts, and other life-related inconveniences. I sometimes worried this made me look slow or lazy to other artists. Starting something fun and new was always tempting. In the end, the goals that were set here were achieved. Now I'm looking forward to smaller stuff for a while.
trying not to get caught up on the dates from early WIPs. Certainly not ignorant to the pace of this industry so there's a feeling of "too late" that's hard to shake off. At the same time, I'm trying to do like you said and just enjoy the process. Prioritize the right kind of things. Learned a bunch, either way
I want something like this -
Has anyone here done an effect similar to this and/or could share relevant tips to get a nice flashy look for the rotor?
figured out the RPM vs FPS math, smeared the rotor blades, and added AE pixel blur to mimic motion blur. That still didn't look good so I animated the blades to instead spin backwards since footage of helicopters appear that way. Amounts to a decent result.
Feels like it could use small bits of fx and some parallax motion to the backdrop but I'm thinking I should set this down and get back to my maglev racer. anyone have input?
tweaked the last few keys to adjust that ease-in. also changed the parameters of the backplate and added a little wobble motion to mimic parallax.
and with that, this project is done, at least until I get the itch to play with vfx stuff lol