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BIG WIND [ Vehicle / Hard Surface ]

Bek
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  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator


    January, 1991. In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, retreating Iraqi forces set fire to an estimated 700 oil wells in Kuwait. These wells burned 5 to 6 million barrels of oil each day. While the coalition non-combat forces tasked with capping these wells were delayed due to the minefields placed by Iraqi forces following the failed invasion, all fires were extinguished within nine months. Left to burn on their own it could have taken two to five years before their reserves were depleted, causing incredible pollution and suffering.


    Of the twenty-seven odd countries involved in these non-combat roles — ranging from South Korea to the Soviet Union — each had their own methods and equipment. Among these nations was a Hungarian team with a rather unique firefighting vehicle — "BIG WIND".

    Taking the chassis of a T-34 Tank and removing the gun turret allowed the mounting of two Tumansky R-25-300F Turbojets, originally designed for the MiG-21. Water pumped into the jet stream turns to fine mist and is blasted into the oil well geyser, disrupting the flames and diminishing the chance of re-ignition from residual heat. For the curious, the documentary "Fires of Kuwait" has footage of the original Big Wind.
    ______________________________________


    As part of a long-term project I will be making the modern incarnation of this machine  — the main difference between this version and the one used in Kuwait is the change from a T-34 chassis to that of a T-55. This is going to be a challenging project as I've never attempted something on this scale. UVing and texturing in particular will involve a host of new challenges, though I intend to take this slowly and try out new techniques and software. Of recent interest is Substance Painter's Dynamic Material Layering, which sounds perfect for something like this.


  • maxivz
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    maxivz interpolator
    Nice man, really interesting vehicle, it looks like its going to be a lot of fun!
    Good start so far, looking forward to see progress in the future
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    Still working on this in between other things (and not touching it in awhile), here's a small update:


    full pic of the track. Above is in TB2; the full thing will be in UE4. I'm going to be using 4.13 decals and tiling textures for the large pieces.
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator



    Most of the above is in-engine already, but I still need to do improve the textures and sort some things out. A little aliasing never hurt anyway. Also, deferred decals are awesome.
  • Joci
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    Joci polycounter lvl 2
    Szia ! Egy kis kiegészítés, Segítség: 
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    @Joci Kösz! (Thanks!)

    Do you have any more of those pics? I haven't got those in my reference folder, and I thought by now I'd collected every picture on the internet of this thing :D I've also been trying to hunt down where I can buy the Hungarian TV show 'Attraktor' season 1 online, as ep. 3 features this vehicle, but I never found a way. There's just a low quality upload on youtube.

    Also, damn I've been neglecting this thread. Here's an update. It's almost done; there are a few things left, mainly the hanging heat shielding, final mat/tex tweaks, and some more clutter. Also need to troubleshoot some DFAO artifacts. I'm also thinking of chucking in some water damage type decals. No idea how long this will take as this continues to be a side project between other stuff.






    (detail lighting for good measure. Also I should mention, the concrete ground and engineer's station plywood textures are from Substance Source)

    Using just over a thousand decals. This is my current decal sheet, other tileable stuff like the two types of wire are on their own sheets:



    Using reduced opacity for the welds was a tip from Millenia; the normals get increased intensity to make up for the lower opacity, which helps show the underlying normals, as current deffered decals in ue4 overwrite, not overlay normals.
  • Joci
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    Joci polycounter lvl 2
    Szia Bek !

    Fantasztikusan jól néz ki a te BigWind -ed !! Nem néztem meg tüzetesen a site, kérlek segíts megérteni a célt. Hobby ? 

    Van még néhány kép, kérek egy e-mail címet és megosztom veled.
    joci.kun63@gmail.com

    Mekem van saját BigWind -em, de csak 1:35, és rossz festés ... :)   
    http://prowler.5mp.eu/web.php?a=prowler&o=a4ebMYwYF5
  • sacboi
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    sacboi high dynamic range

    Great concept!, I also remember a doco about Red Adair and his crew's exploits in the war's aftermath tackling those fires, man! talk about balls the size of dump trucks for all the guys who'd capped the wells :)

    The hardsurface modelling is top notch finesse considering the overall complexity of your project, much respect by the way porting in-engine really illustrates the time and effort involved. 

    A small crit though, (...sorry possibly being too nit-picky) by assessing the earlier updates what is noticeable from my POV are the dimensions of the track pin bushings, link tread and nuts seem to be slightly out of proportion. I've a military background when a young man waaay back in the day, whilst on assignment I recall details when seconded to a tank museum working on a captured T54/55 exhibit alongside jogging the ol' memory via google'd images of this T series variant as well.

    Anyways duly bookmarked, will look forward seeing further progress.

    Cheers.       

  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    Just wanted to post about a small adaptation I made to my texturing workflow. When looking at the painted metal references I wanted to replicate the layer of rust you get between the paint and underlying steel, like so:



    What I needed was a way to blend between two materials (rust and steel, with paint as a 'base') using only one mask. Enter substance designer...



    So converting a black and white mask to a 3-colour rgb mask was simple. My plan was to use be able to blend between folders of materials in Painter by storing the mask in a User channel, but unfortunately that didn't work out. Luckily Allegorithmic have said they are working on instancing in Painter, which will hopefully eliminate the need for a SD filter to create the 3-colour mask. As a workaround, rather than using two masks in Painter and copy/pasting them to preview changes, I've exported the black and white mask from Painter, and blended the base (paint) textures in designer with the mask (converted to the RGB version) as the colour-id input on a multi-material blend node. While not as ideal as having this all working in 'real time' inside painter, it's still neat to get this result from one mask, with exposed params to easily adjust the level/spread of rust:



    and the result:



    I'll probably add some blurring to smooth out the transitions between the materials, but hopefully Painter will soon get instancing and all this will be simpler.
  • Joci
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    Joci polycounter lvl 2
    Hy Ben !
    Újra itt , és egy kérdés. A Big Wind alkotásánál milyen méretek voltak neked. Én próbálok tervraz találni, de nem sikerült eddig.
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    @Joci I don't think I ever found a plan either; I used T-55 & R-11F2S-300 engine dimensions as a start and based the rest off of photographs (rough guess / estimate)

    These were the dimensions for the turbine engines I had in my notes:

    Specifications (R-11F2S-300)

        Type: Afterburning turbojet
        Length: 4,600 mm (181.1 in)
        Diameter: 906 mm (35.7 in)
        Dry weight: 1,124 kg (2,477 lb)
  • Joci
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    Joci polycounter lvl 2
    Írja be a megjegyzést
  • Joci
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    Joci polycounter lvl 2
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