3D craft

spahr

Hey everyone, spent the last 24 hours working hard on this awesome Feng Zhu concept, trying to get the high poly ready so I can work on my low soon. Want to spend about a week on this prop. Heres the design...




Heres what I have so far,


and heres some orthos i took an hour or so ago,




hope you like it, and im really trying to make all the Zhu fans happy, so any C&C would be great. I'm doing this project to try my hand in a quality next gen prop, I've read so much theory lately, time to put it to the test.

CHEERS

adam

Hey man, looking great! The eyes look weird in that they're just sphere intersecting the head frame. I'd ground them a bit more with an inset lip. Give that shape some silhouette beyond half a sphere. (Also: Add the small rivets going around the eyes from the concept).

spahr

yeah ill definatly do that, do you have any time for adding rivets? it seems very tedious to do one by one. I was thinking of just placing the normals shape into my texture, would i run into any problems doing that? because there should be rivets on just about every seam, that's no fun :P.

Oh and adam, I got the motivation and idea for this prop from you, with that cool Feng Zhu prop you did and placed it under water, that looks sharp man. Although i have no plans for moving parts....yet

Sirdelita

God i would love to see the topology on this!!! looking great dood!

praxedes

if you have zbush you can "cheat" and paint rivets on with 3d meshinsert dot brush, adding halfspheres you've exported, then take your mesh back to your 3d prog. It works quite well if you do it towards the end of the modelling process, and I find ZB brushes more interactive than other 3d apps.

But your mileage may vary and I am sure the next 20 people will have better solutions :P

~P~

spahr

Thanks for the comments, and praxedes thanks for the tip, though Id probably be slower in zbrush :P. But I understand what you mean, good idea.

Well here are the wires for my model, i have the Low Poly model close to done, I am looking for 9-10k polys, so a few thousand off, but theres a few areas i can cut. So these are the 3 models i have, Low Poly on the left, the High poly pre-sub D in the middle, and then the sub D on the right which ill bake from.



and heres a quick render of it, if it helps



So once I have the low poly where i want it, UVING!!!!.......*sigh*

spahr

sorry for so many posts, but a buddy told me to do better material and render cause its hard to tell details. so heres something a bit better

praxedes

nice! should bake out really well- good clean mesh

~P~

spahr

Have it uved, baked out the normals. Luckily i was uving piece by piece, because this is my first real legit try at baking, only did exercises before. And I learnt quite a bit about how they bake, its not as simple as just uving anythin and letting maya take over. My AO bake is a bit noisy, so still working on it. And i guess i have lots of intersecting mesh on my high poly, which causes a yellowy orange normal bit to bake out. Few minor things ill just fix in photoshop. So heres a quick screen grab of low poly with normals on, in real time high quality mode in maya...



So i got it down to the polycount i wanted it. But as you can see theres some weird artifacting going on, as in the spine area has those black areas leaking out the sides, inside the front cylinder it didnt bake out properly. Yeah, so I just have a dozen or so little fixes to make, and then try to clean up the noise on my AO bake, and its texture time for me!

Thanks in advance for any feedback

imb3nt

looks really good! :thumbup:

stimpack

looks great!

spahr

thanks guys

Snipergen

Great work, I hope you take your own pass on the textures because the concept drawing is a bit too monotone for my taste

spahr

So heres the base diffuse i have. Just did a quick base colour, and then scratched the paint off. just to get a general feel. Obviously need to work on the scratches, the normals look a but dumb when your close up as seen in the front. Id like to add burn marks from the front, and add a cool glow to make it look HOT. and then the 2 side half spheres have those as lights. Ive never done anything like that in unreal, so i wanna try it out. Also I want to beat it up some more, bullet holes, dents, and grime. Any suggestions on the design of the texture or anything like that, please feel free to just throw any idea at me



So i think im going to take the rest of the day off lol, this 5 day project has felt like a month :P. Thanks in advance for the feedback

Cheers

ZacD

I'd make a 2 or 3 color paint job for it, I'm digging the blue and black but I think you could push it a bit more. And do something with the eyes. And the normals on the scratches look inverted. Looks amazing though, but whats the scale? And 10k tri's seems a bit high. And is that in unreal?

nfrrtycmplx

this turned out exceptional. More colour variation FTW though. other than that.. finish him. and ship it.

crazyfingers

Not a fan of those 2 eyes, seems a little cutesy and reminds me of the drones from Star wars episode 1. Threw this together, Slapped a couple eyes elsewhere. They were just scopes i found on google and took off one of the turrets to break up the symmetry:


Obviously this is all up to personal preference and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the original. But you wanted ideas, so here's mine...

On the right track though!

thegreypencil

Real sweet man.

I'm with crazy fingers on the eyes, I think they're looking oversized right now but it could just be the angle and colour though. Again, its personal preference.

spahr

Hey guys thanks for the feedback. Yeah for me the eye needs something or it has to go. It kind of makes the craft look "special". like they aren't 3 crafts looking for a group of rebels to slaughter, but they they lost their way home and are just floating around in circles. I love the idea of switching up the size of one of those guns to offset the symmetry, brilliant. Right now im having trouble playing with the colour tones, everything i come up with makes it look like a kinder surprise trinket. Only thing ive come up with that i like is having 2 or 3 tones of one colour. If you guys have any ideas im all ears.

But I wont be able to make the kind of progression ive made this week, cause I just landed actual work.

Ill post some ideas of the paint job when i have a good dozen to show you guys. If you wanna post your own, im all ears.

Thanks guys

pangarang

I'm speechless, Cody. This is awesome. Def. one of the strongest pieces you've ever done!

System

very nice, texturing is really killer work:D

torontoanimator

pretty awesome dude i love how bee-like it is

spahr

thanks guys. Yeah Josh, like i said before, ive read SO much next gen stuff, and felt i was on the sidelines just gawking at all these great artists on here, and i needed to step up. Ive made a lot of leaps over this past week. Still have lots of leaps to go :P. So i took crazy fingers ideas and just added a few extra bits, and did a quick paint over. I figured i didnt like multiple colours(or couldnt create anthing i liked, so if you guys have an idea please post it). So heres what i got...



I wanted to do the front like that HOT engine look in unreal, anyone know how?

Thanks guys

EbolaV

wow looks badass. Good choice to kick those eyes. keep it up

spahr

So I made some tweaks to the texture. Finished off its spec and proper materials on parts. That broke up the blue paint a lot. I brought it into unreal, and just put it in an existing unreal tournament engine. So this is just a screen show of the editor, nothing fantastic, going to have to set up a proper rig later.




Oh and I got the poly count under 9k, and could easily get it to 6-7k, but i like its shape. Might make LODs I dont know right now. Lots of stuff on my plate.

Thanks everyone for your comments. Probably going to set up a render later this week and call it quits before unearthly starts. Of course ill still take the feedback if you have something, i know this isnt perfect so you must have some .

Zack Fowler

Hey man, looking very nice here! For that hot engine look you mentioned, what you would do is place a something with a "distortion" material applied at the exhaust port. For an animation you would probably want to use a particle emitter that is attached to an appropriate bone of the skeletal mesh, but if all you want is still shots you can just manually place a few planes with distortion materials applied in the scene.