Kamov Ka-50 "Black Shark" Helicopter
polycounter lvl 9
update:
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The Kamov Ka-50 is an awesome Russian helicopter which utilizes two counter-rotating blades to neutralize torque (instead of the usual tail rotor, which counter-acts it). If you've ever played the old Comanche games (voxels!) this was one of the bad guys. It is also known by its NATO reporting name "Hokum".
Design for this thing was finished in 1985, but production didn't occur until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Because of the sudden budget constraints, only 20 or so were made. A revised version, the Ka-52, is going to see much greater production, but I decided to make the 50 instead because it looks way better.
I plan on making a full game-ready mesh for this project, so it's missing quite a few small details (panels, rivets, and inset details, mostly) that I'm going to either model later or do in photoshop. The mast and linkages for the rotors are pretty basic for this reason as well.
--- original post vvv ---
The Kamov Ka-50 is an awesome Russian helicopter which utilizes two counter-rotating blades to neutralize torque (instead of the usual tail rotor, which counter-acts it). If you've ever played the old Comanche games (voxels!) this was one of the bad guys. It is also known by its NATO reporting name "Hokum".
Design for this thing was finished in 1985, but production didn't occur until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Because of the sudden budget constraints, only 20 or so were made. A revised version, the Ka-52, is going to see much greater production, but I decided to make the 50 instead because it looks way better.
I plan on making a full game-ready mesh for this project, so it's missing quite a few small details (panels, rivets, and inset details, mostly) that I'm going to either model later or do in photoshop. The mast and linkages for the rotors are pretty basic for this reason as well.
Replies
btw ProTip: don't let the speculars on your presentation material go all burnt out (pure white). Instead, lower the spec level until they just start to go bright. And put a slight hint of color in there, like a really faint brown tint in the diffuse color. It'll look better, honestly
I'm looking forward to seeing this with a texture. I'm also eagerly awaiting to see how it looks low poly.
**I just looked at your page... The welds and scope texture on your VSS look spot on.
Here are the wires of the low-poly model so far:
It's mostly finished, except for the Shipunov cannon, the cutaway in the fairing for said cannon, and the rotor/mast stuff.
Also it kinda strange you spend your polies on nice rounding everywhere (which is ok) but then seem to skip the front of the cockpit class (it's really sharp) ?
as for the cockpit, I'm going to see how the details bake, and if they look flat (probable) I'm going to model the window frames on.
I don't mean to be obstinate, I appreciate the criticism. I just feel like this part really needed the volume. Let me know what you think!
Here's lowpoly + normals + AO
I'm not entirely sure about how I'm going to add panels, but I think I am going to model out some panel shapes and render-to-texture them as color shapes, and then use the stroke modifier in photoshop to define them. I figure that I can avoid distortion from the UV unwraps this way. I really hate drawing stuff on in photoshop and then checking back and forth for distortion. I'll probably just chop up the current hull to avoid any unnecessary work.
Your bake looks excellent i must say !
Ignore the red text on the bottom; it's just a reminder I forgot to remove before I took the screenies! Oh and I modeled the navigation lights on the wing pods because they will be two different colors (red and green) and I wanted to be able to mirror the pods.
As for the rivets, I created a 1x2 photoshop brush with high spacing and drew the rivets on. Then, in the normal map, I separated the top pixel from the bottom, used them as a mask and assigned an appropriately aligned normal color to the layer (upwards for the top pixel, downwards for the bottom pixel). For the 2x2 pixel rivets, I did the same thing but with corner facing normal values.
If you want some inspiration for textures, check this out: http://polygoo.com/port/rsheli.html
RobertHammer: yeah, I should probably do the cockpit too. I'll do that later on though, I'm on a texturing kick right now. I need to model more of the ordinance too.
lhazard, here's a wireframe. Sorry it's not quads, but the untriangulated version of my model is exploded into a million pieces and I don't want to put it back together right now. I'll do it for sure when I make the presentation shots at the end of all of this, so look forward to it then!
really is a lean mean killing machine
I haven't applied even an iota of weathering and surface texture, it's just the base colors, decals, and some rudimentary specular. The yellow color is from the dawn sky that comes with the marmoset toolbag. It looks like 8 monkey labs just released a sky tool for the marmoset toolbag, so I'm going to be making some better skies for reflections. There's also a gross discontinuity in the AO from separate bakes that I'm going to fix in the space between the fuselage and the engines.
I'm also very impressed about the rivets and panels. Especially as you added them more or less in PS than in ypur highpoly.
I would have expected serious issues when adding thing like pannels in 2d.
What texture resolution are we looking at? Must be quite high as the rivets and panels seem to be sharp as hell. Do you mind giving a little more detail on how you got the pannels and rivets on the texture without distortions?
Medestruit, I'm glad to hear that they read so well. I found that including them in the normal was the best option, since they would perturb both lighting and specular.
Slave_zero: this is a 2048x2048 texture. As far as distortion goes, for the most part It's not an issue. I made very basic panel shapes by extracting geometry on the nose and the engines and RTT them for use in masks in photoshop so that I wouldn't have to deal with distortion, but for the rest of the model it was just drawing it by hand. I used a stroke layer effect on white objects set to multiply so that I could control all panels at once as a sort of global effect when making panels.
Got some work done on the aging and specular, and I did some tests to see how it would hold up under different lighting (very lazy tests, because they're all default skyboxes in marmoset)
oh and Vikhr missiles and external fuel tanks as well.
Is there any way to do real transparency in marmoset? I ended up doing two screenshots and setting one to 50% opacity in photoshop. Also, if I do something like this in portfolio shots, will it be considered cheating? I figure it's such a common thing in games with vehicles to have transparent windscreens that it wouldn't be bad, but I don't want to commit a grave sin as far as portfolios go.
btw dont forget about rocket pods too
btw2 you will make also the cockpit from inside?
Yes there is a way to do real transparency in marmoset. You'll need to create an alpha channel for the cockpit with greyscale controlling your opacity, detach the canopy itself, and import both into marmoset. That way you have 2 models essentially in marmoset, your Helo and your Canopy. Create a separate material for the canopy, and set the Alpha Testing to "On" play with the global alpha sliders, and also set your material blend mode to "Alpha".
And for portfolio shots, it's fine to do some tweaks, but when it comes to things materials that translate in-game, its important to show off the knowledge of creating translucent materials, etc.
Textures are looking great btw!
If I was to do this in another engine that supported scalar values (such as with source's vertexLitGeneric and the $alpha key or unreal3's opacity channel), my all-on-one-texture method would be valid, correct? It seems like it would be memory intensive to do this for all vehicles with transparent windscreens.
Xoliul: thanks! Can you tell me which ones look toyish to you? I've never really played around with FOV before and I was trying to get close shots without much distortion around the edges.
RobertHammer: I probably should make rocket pods. As for making the cockpit from the inside, if you mean with full detail with tens of thousands of polys, then no I'm not going to. It did strike me as a possible future project when I was making the cockpit for this guy, though, so who knows? maybe in the future.
edit: so I got the alpha channel working, but it doesn't treat the skybox properly. It draws the background color behind itself instead. It also becomes opaque looking, colored the same as the skybox from certain angles. Is there any way to fix this, or is it just the way the marmoset engine works?
And what was your general workflow? Did you build the base shape and then weld on pieces like the engines and pylons? Looking to build a helicopter of my own - going in the inspiration folder for sure
http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=military%20paint&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1680&bih=965
In your close-up shots the spec looks quite cool but in all those shots from a distance the surface seems quite glossy. Comparing your naterial to this foto I'd say try o tweak the glossy and spec mal a little more.
To me it looks like the black engine parts and the blueish bottom area are supposed to have more specular than all the camouflage areas. The camo areas don't seem to have much specular at all.
Thanks a bunch for the crits, I will update soon!
PS Contrails: I'll include the normal map when I post the fixed specular tomorrow.
Contrails, here's the normal map:
Sorry it's so compressed. I guess imageshack re-compresses everything.
The rivets are kind of crap looking here, but all I did was make a two-pixel brush with wide spacing and drew it with the pencil tool for maximum clarity. The top pixel has a normal pointing somewhere between 45 and 60 degrees up, and the bottom is somewhere between 45 and 60 down.
http://www.enemyforces.net/helicopters/ka500.jpg