Search and Rescue helicopter: Ka-27PS "Helix"
polycounter lvl 9
Update:
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I decided to make another helicopter after my Ka-50, and it ended up being another Kamov design! This one is a Ka-27 "Helix". It's standard variant is somewhat close in function to the US Navy's P3 Orion, but the version I'm making is designed for maritime search and rescue purposes. To that end, there is a winch on the left side rear door. For those interested, the Ka-27 was designed to replace the similar Ka-25 "Hormone", and has another variant with a different canopy and hardpoints for weaponry called the Ka-31. I'm going for an old, weathered look, with this paint job: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kamov_Ka-27PS.JPEG
It turns out that it's used by a whole bunch of non-ex-soviet countries as well, so I might end up making heliswiss and korean fire fighting paint jobs as well.
Anyways, here's the high poly model:
--- v v v original post v v v ---
I decided to make another helicopter after my Ka-50, and it ended up being another Kamov design! This one is a Ka-27 "Helix". It's standard variant is somewhat close in function to the US Navy's P3 Orion, but the version I'm making is designed for maritime search and rescue purposes. To that end, there is a winch on the left side rear door. For those interested, the Ka-27 was designed to replace the similar Ka-25 "Hormone", and has another variant with a different canopy and hardpoints for weaponry called the Ka-31. I'm going for an old, weathered look, with this paint job: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kamov_Ka-27PS.JPEG
It turns out that it's used by a whole bunch of non-ex-soviet countries as well, so I might end up making heliswiss and korean fire fighting paint jobs as well.
Anyways, here's the high poly model:
Replies
Btw you're fast with creating this, how long did the HP take you ?
Xoliul, it took me a little less than a week. Is that fast? I honestly have no idea how long it takes people to make stuff because I've never met another 3d modeler.
Looking great man, tho beware of filling up the portfolio with similar stuff
Drav: you're right about variety; I don't want to get pigeon-holed before I'm even out of the gate. That Ka-50 was my first finished vehicle, so I want to take what I learned from that project and try to really hit it out of the park with this new one.
Eventually I plan on going back to everything older in my portfolio and redoing the textures and whatnot based on what I've learned here to keep stuff consistent in quality before I start applying to studios.
The ambient occlusion is all little detail stuff; I haven't done any of the non-exploded baking yet. The texture size is 2048x2048. The big ol' gap in the bottom right is where the tiling interior textures are mapped to, but there's nothing there since I haven't made high poly geometry for the interior yet.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I need to do a little bit of fixing in two places, but it's come out pretty well.
And for non-exploded baking, give FAOgen a try
Also, holy crap FAOgen is fast. I mean, Topogun's hardware accelerated AO is pretty fast too, but this is great! The only problem I can see is that it the AO gets multiplied over existing data when it calculates objects which share UV space. It looks like I might be able to generate images on a per object basis though, so I suppose I could through the duplicates in one object and the stuff I want baked in another. Thanks for the suggestion!
Edit: it looks like it doesn't play nice with geometry discontinuity; my seams look kind of crap. Those guys will need some welding.
I think it just uses the draw order of UV islands. So you could just offset their coordinates outside of the 0-1 range.
What seams do you mean, smooth group splits or UV seams ? I haven't really noticed a problem there.
Looks sweet man, you should think about taking it a bit further than just Marmoset, like rigging for UDK or something
Very good job. Wish I could make something like this.
Those coaxial propellers were a kind of pain, aren't they?
polozad: the rotors were kind of a pain, but I've already made rotors of the same type (though less mechanically intensive) with my last helicopter so I knew what pitfalls to avoid. A lot of the difficulty is in figuring out what part links to what other part how; it definitely helps to know how a helicopter works. Frankly, now that I'm comfortable with complicated rotors, I think that any non-kamov helicopter is going to be a huge bore in the rotor department.
The biggest advice I could give is to make stuff like linkages and control rods with cylinders that have the number of sides you would use on the retopologized model, or multiples thereof. My control rods were 8-sided in the hipoly so that I could just remove edges and get a 4 sided cylinder; some of the connecting linkages were made with 6-sided cylinders which required nothing more than cleaning up the supporting edges. By doing this, you avoid needing to keep track of rotations and positions when doing retopo.
Lonewolf, PhilipK: Thanks!
While I was working on the paneling, I had a huge problem with the seams, and I ended up doing a very work intensive solution that I don't want to have to do again, so I would like to hear what you guys think.
My normal process for doing anything with nvidia's photoshop plugin is to mask the resulting normal map with the unfiltered base, since the plugin creates a border that extends beyond the original surface area of the height map. This works really well for many details, but it doesn't work very well with things that have a 2px "valley" shape, such as the seams and panels. I end up losing detail on all of the horizontal and vertical lines because my original line becomes the flat color on the normal, and the slopes of the valley are on either side. Since This only happened in like 15 places on this guy due to the low number seams, I just fixed it by hand after spending half an hour playing around with nDo and nvidia's plugin. However, should I do anything more complicated, that solution is no good. Anybody have any advice?
Damn!
I gotta give nDo a go.
Hey you still have some space in the texture to get some stuff in, maybe some more interior details?
Actually, thewinterlord, that blank space is going to be used for exactly that! I haven't baked the interior yet, but the UVs are laid out and just waiting for me to get to them!
What programs are you using?
btw if you do next Mi24 Super Hind - you will be my big hero
RobertHammer: I've considered doing that helicopter in the past (especially with googly eyes and shark mouth paint job), it's pretty sweet but I want to have a more diverse portfolio so I'm going to be making an original concept next. Besides, I thought I was already your hero for putting a cockpit in my Ka-50
It is alot more modern and more angry look
I've finished with the colors for this thing. I'm just using the AO for specular in these images, and I haven't applied any dirt or material variation.
Good job! :thumbup:
EDIT: I figured it out, and I've since dirtied up the windows, too.
How did you do the dripping grime stains?
Contrails: Very slowly! I have a scratches brush that looks like a square with one of it's corners partially erased, and a very high rotation jitter, as well as a size controlled by pen pressure. I know I didn't come up with that idea; I think it's from someone on this forum. Anyways, I draw with a low opacity (10-20%) and a single pixel size so that I get decent, grainy streaks, and I also smudge and erase with the same brush at about 5 pixels in size. I don't smudge the streaks like you would normally use the smudge brush; the smudge tool with the scratches brush acts like a diffuser, spreading out and obliterating the grime. I basically just draw stains, smudge (diffuse) and erase stuff, over and over in the same spot until I'm happy with it. I'm guessing it takes probably 10-20 passes for a single small area. Honestly though I still need to go back and do some more because I never add enough grunge, for fear of adding too much.
here's an image of what I'm talking about, with full size bits of my diffuse:
You can see how the smudge tool w/ 5 pixel scratches brush and 100% strength sort of just spreads the grime out in place without dragging it anywhere. I just sort of draw the spreading out effect on.