[WIP] Churchill MK VII Tank

tystnad

Hi, everyone!
   I've decided to start a new topic to share my progress on a personal project I'm currently working on. 

The turret was my old test task back in 2019. Unfortunately, it wasn’t successful, and I was quite frustrated that I didn't even get a single line of feedback on it. But time has passed, I looked at it again and decided that it wasn't that bad after all. After a couple of tweaks, maybe it is worth adding it to my portfolio, but this time as a complete model of a tank. That's why the turret already has both highpoly and lowpoly models now, as well as UV layout, while the hull is still at the blocking stage. 

   The turret is 5,456 tris so far. The blue parts in the renders are the areas I plan to overlap on the UV. Also the model has temporary cuts right now in the non-visible areas. I did that in order to place some UV shells there and in the final model the cuts are going to be removed.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.   

tystnad

tystnad

Here are some reference images, the UVs and a close-up of the turret with the wireframe.

sacboi

No crits for your UVs, modeling workflow plus final intent because it's probably how I'd approach generating an asset this complex and by the way, from my experience 5k triangle turret, is quite optimised considering the existing level of detail. 

So I'll confine my comment to eventual in-engine or realtime viewer showcase, specifically story telling element whether 'battle worn veteran' or 'freshly baked factory unit' or indeed combination thereof. Anyway regardless, IMHO some mechanical hard surface artists seem to miss, are it's tactical markings that I believe convey an identical relevance to a finished piece alongside grunge or contact damage, since basically denotes where the vehicle had served and with whom.        

tystnad

   Hi again. As it always happens, every time I try to start a new topic on this forum something distracts me from working on a model.

But now I'm back to share some progress. I've been working on the tracks and the side part of the model. So far I've made a draft lowpoly, highpoly and a test bake.

   The trickiest part was gathering enough reference to understand how the tracks are joined and how they work. Then I stumbled upon the fact that the lowpoly model of the tracks needs to support animation and that my first version of them was not fit for this purpose. I've made a separate screenshot to illustrate the issues I've encountered with the tracks. To cut a long story short, eventually I've chosen the segmented version V2. It has more polygons, but at least it does not have geometry or texture skewing while moving.

   Baked textures are currently twice the intended resolution, so right now it's looking a bit better than it's going to be in the final version.