WIP - Heli MH-6

pumbaa

Hi

I'm doing the MH-6 Little Bird helicopter, possibly meant for the UDK engine and I got a few wonderings about the highpoly, how would you create the highpoly for this one? I know there's probably not a specific way to do it, but a few thoughts and ideas from cunning people would be greatly appreciated.

I'm having a hard time adding supporting edges to the existing lowpoly model without getting a lot of smoothing errors on the outer hull, and working with a very dense sphere in Maya seems pretty tough.

Also I know there's not any specific rule to polycounts, but I got a feeling a tri count of 13589 is too much for a typical current gen lowpoly vehicle. I got pretty much detailing going on around the rotors that I can cut away.

Thanks

Xoliul

Sweet stuff dude, I always liked the shapes of the real heli.
Yours looks pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
Anyway regarding your HP and polycount question:
I'd rebalance things a bit. You've got big shapes that could do with more segments (exhaust!!, window edges) and then you have tiny details that really don't need that much detail (cockpit controls, stretcher/seat hinges).
I'm sure you can get this to about 10-11k with some tweaking, while it'll even look beter overall.
Once that's done, you might not need a highpoly for everything; you could get away with doing the panel and detail lines in photoshop, they'll definitely end up sharper and more defined that way.
In my case specifically I could get it to look almost as good as baked, some parts maybe even better, but it would take a whole lot less time to do due to no HP modeling and baking, just cutting straight to the fun stuff
If you would really want to make an HP for the body then yeah, you'd have to redo it completely as the current polyflow is not lending itself for such a complicated object.
There are people that will disagree with me, but since this is a personal project just do what you think is more fun.

edit: looking at ref, I think you forgot some details on the skids, I'd add them as they make the silhouette more interesting, like here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/DF-SD-05-03139.JPEG

pumbaa

Mr. Xoliul: That's great news, I was hoping I could get away without HP modeling the body, I'm rebalancing right away.

Thanks

Xoliul

NP man, I know the feeling. All that baking gets to me sometimes, so doing a project without any of the headaches due to it can be way more fun.

By the way, if you have Modern Warfare 2 and finished the campaign, you can play this sort of "museum" scene where you can view the vehicles up close from all angles. Could be interesting to see how infinity Ward did them, as a benchmark for quality