beetle mount

pazuo

I've been working on a beetle mount for one of my classes and thought i should post it up here before i attempt to take it any farther. the carriage is going to be bolted to the shell. i was thinking of making some sort of leather banding holding the luggage rack on. eventually id like to run the entire thing through zbrush but that comes later.

Eric Wiley

Nice! I really like the idea. I would add more geometry on the legs. Right now you have 4 sides on each leg, I would make it at least 6. Keep up the good work.

AsylumSeaker

I'd add some alpha planes around the leg joints for those hairy bits, I think its an important feature of bugs that often gets overlooked.

Jonas Ronnegard

love anything with mounts in it, hope it will turn out great,

TorQue[MoD]

Looks great so far though I agree with Eric & Asylum that you should up the polys on the legs and add hair planes (eventually). This would be a great idea for a game... bug riders... wasn't there a cartoon or animated feature that did this?

Love that you chose a rhino beetle too!

vertexguy

Looks like a good start. You didn't really say if you are aiming for a game asset or something just for render, but I'll assume a game asset. Either case, I think your poly distribution could be revised a bit between the head area and the legs. The legs could use more definition in key areas. It's obvious they are just uniform extrudes. Move the verts around a bit to make them feel more organic. The top part with the pointy horn by the head seems to have more polys in it than necessary, so you could put those polys into the legs. Also if its for a game, the rim detail on the carriage is a bit too subtle to be worth having the polygons for. Overall its a good start!

pazuo

sorry its been a while. i was shooting for game asset and i still need to move the verts around on the head and head armor but i think i fixed the legs. i ended up dropping the extras so i could finish it in time for my mid term in maya1. its my first normal map but i think i got it right. i know your not supposed to open the normal map in photoshop but i don't know why.

CheeseOnToast

Who the hell told you not to open the normal map in photoshop? Total bullshit. You can actually use PS and the nvidia normal map filter to add even more detail to the normal map. The important thing to do after that is to flatten the image and run the filter again, set to "normalise only". This ensures that your map is clean, and prevents any artifacts being left over from editing.

pazuo

i remember reading something about photo shops auto image color correction or something like that changing the normals but i guess it was bogus

Josh_Singh

yes that is total bull. If your instructor or whatever told you that, tell him he's stupid and should quit his job .
This is a cool Idea. I can't wait to see his gear!

pliang

It is a cool idea...I have a friend who worked on something like this when he was graduating last year...

Are we gonna have some decals/markings on the exoskeleton ?

Personally the overall green seems kind of plain to me.