Saab JA-37 Viggen: I can't stop making aircraft aaaaaaaaaa
polycounter lvl 9
Update:
Original post
I was working on an original design when I realized that I needed to go back to the drawing board with it, so I decided to make a jet in the mean time, because frankly I feel lazy if I'm not modeling or texturing every day. And it's not even Russian for once! I apologize if spamming the boards with aircraft is annoying anybody; I haven't made very many vehicles so I'm always looking for critique. This will definitely be the last one for a while. Once again this will be a complete game model when I'm done.
This time I'm doing a Swedish jet. On the nerd side of things, this guy has an unusual arrangement where the horizontal stabilizers are in front of the wings. Called canards, the type used on the Viggen is close-coupled, which produces less drag than a conventional arrangement. Because of this configuration, the wings have elevons instead of ailerons: they can function as both ailerons and elevators. The vertical stabilizer is hinged at the base and can fold completely sideways, allowing the Viggen to fit into much smaller spaces. It also has bicycle style rear wheels to keep a narrower profile, so that the wheels can fit into the wing. A near semi-permanent drop tank is mounted centrally, adding 30% more fuel. It is no longer in use by Sweden, having been retired in 2005.
Here's the finished high-poly:
It's much lower in surface detail than my previous stuff because most of the visual interest is going to be in the panels and grime, of which I have wonderful reference. Also, I modeled the wheel wells and associated tangles of cables separately instead of cutting them into the wings and fuselage because it would be a huge pain in the ass to do in the high poly model and it wouldn't make the end result any better. Those nasty cuts before the cockpit are along panel lines, and are not nearly as noticable under normal lighting conditions.
Original post
I was working on an original design when I realized that I needed to go back to the drawing board with it, so I decided to make a jet in the mean time, because frankly I feel lazy if I'm not modeling or texturing every day. And it's not even Russian for once! I apologize if spamming the boards with aircraft is annoying anybody; I haven't made very many vehicles so I'm always looking for critique. This will definitely be the last one for a while. Once again this will be a complete game model when I'm done.
This time I'm doing a Swedish jet. On the nerd side of things, this guy has an unusual arrangement where the horizontal stabilizers are in front of the wings. Called canards, the type used on the Viggen is close-coupled, which produces less drag than a conventional arrangement. Because of this configuration, the wings have elevons instead of ailerons: they can function as both ailerons and elevators. The vertical stabilizer is hinged at the base and can fold completely sideways, allowing the Viggen to fit into much smaller spaces. It also has bicycle style rear wheels to keep a narrower profile, so that the wheels can fit into the wing. A near semi-permanent drop tank is mounted centrally, adding 30% more fuel. It is no longer in use by Sweden, having been retired in 2005.
Here's the finished high-poly:
It's much lower in surface detail than my previous stuff because most of the visual interest is going to be in the panels and grime, of which I have wonderful reference. Also, I modeled the wheel wells and associated tangles of cables separately instead of cutting them into the wings and fuselage because it would be a huge pain in the ass to do in the high poly model and it wouldn't make the end result any better. Those nasty cuts before the cockpit are along panel lines, and are not nearly as noticable under normal lighting conditions.
Replies
I live right next to SAABs airfield so I see the JAS 39s almost everyday.
I'd be interested in seeing you take this a bit further than the previous heli's; they still felt a bit clean and tame in terms of texturing.
ErichWK: If you mean the renders, I just use a basic 3 point light set up, and a phong material with a broad but weak specular (to emphasize the volumes), and I add an AO pass to that. I'm trying to emulate Ilya Nedyal, actually. The material itself is just slightly brown. Oh and normally only the key light contributes to specular, but in this case I let the rim do it too so that the edges of the transparent canopy showed up better. One thing I work hard to get is a broad range of values across a model. I set up the key light so that it lights one part of the model really well, but large (< 50%) portions are almost unlit. I then place the fill so that those parts are visible. The rim light is just there to pop the silhouette out, and provide "hot" areas to contrast darker areas.
Xoliul: Yeah, I feel like my biggest problem right now is texturing, especially with dirt and grime. I always make stuff way cleaner than it should be. I'm going to be doing a pass over my entire portfolio where I redo all the textures with everything I've learned these last four months before I start applying to places. I will definitely appreciate as much critique as I can get on my texture work. You'll be happy to know that this is my goal as far as grime goes:
Photo 1
Photo 2
Pzychaoz: Sure! I have some pretty atrocious stuff in places (specifically the wings), I should warn you. I still don't feel entirely competent with high poly stuff, so please don't attempt to learn too much from my stuff. I really should go back and make the wings better, just as an exercise.
Oh yeah and there are three vertices with a crease value, which I used to keep them from pulling away from other panels, in order to preserve simplicity of the mesh. I wouldn't recommend using that until you have otherwise completed the mesh, because there's no way to know the crease value (at least in XSI) at a glance, without inspecting suspicious vertices. They aren't particularly visible, since they were only done to fix gaps of approximately one inch; the rest of this model is all normal sub-d.
The maps themselves, at quarter size:
I have a few little things that need ironing out, but nothing too horrible. I think I just need to re-bake the tiny little intake on the ventral side.
Maps (Originally 2048x2048)
In order to save UV space, the left side "FARA" intake warning and the numbers on the wings are actually separate objects, slightly raised above the main mesh. They are cut straight out of the main geometry, with a few optimizations but otherwise coplanar angle-wise. I baked the diffuse and specular straight from the main textures, but with the added color detail. Normals are baked from the high poly. Because there are two numbers and only one wing, this means that it takes two bakes to transfer the details. However, since I only need to do this when I've otherwise finished a texture, and because it only takes 2 minutes to do the whole process, I figure it's a fair trade off, since I get loads and loads of extra UV space. Those weird red squigglies in the middle of the diffuse map are the wing numbers. You can see the extra "FARA" on the very left edge, near the bottom.
I would've just cut the panel with the number out, and mapped one of them separately. Fixinf seams there would've been easy compared to the current method's hassles.
Edit; I wanna know how you did the diffuse on the inside of the wheelwells, from your bake? I hate that sorta stuff, it's difficult to figure out what to model or texture there, but still it has to look full of stuff and believable...
Great job on it, and incredibly fast work!
As for the interior, here's what it looks like:
When i texture stuff I have loads of color swatch layers that are all masked off, so for this thing I just baked masks from XSI and applied them to the correct color swatches. Incidentally, you can make perfect flawless masks with no work at all if you have 3 or less elements by making one element red, one blue, and one green and then just using the channels as masks. That's what I did here.
As for filling up space, I agree it's a pain in the ass, but good reference helps. I have some excellent photos of the inside of Viggen gear wells. It's not perfectly accurate, but it's good enough for the purposes of this model.
I reused alot of these elements in the rear well, combining it with new stuff so that it better matched the reference images.
e: not that I'm lazy or anything, it's more of a time management thing for me
Awesome example. Can't find anything to complain about. Looks great. I feel your pain about the numbers/rivets and stuff. I did one myself(except for Highpoly) I went with the method Xoliul described. Won't your method generate z-fighting?
Allthough I disagree about the numbers being too saturated. They had some highly reflective/flourescent paint for those. I like it the way they are!
tda: When I was younger I always wanted to make model airplanes, but I lacked the patience to actually make them look good. I'm pretty sure that I'm scratching that same itch right now.
Here's a WIP shot of the grime. I'm working really hard to make it look a lot better than my last work, especially with Xoliul's advice to get some color in there. The grime is composed of seven colors right now: Light brown, dark brown, warm dark grey, purply-mauve, green, teal, and a little bit of a light greyish blue (not much of that last one).
Let me know what you think! Oh and that back portion is supposed to be really dirty because the thrust reversers vomit exhaust all over the side of the airplane every time it lands.
texture is looking great, i think your work is paying off. I presume the areas without grime as of yet, will get a treatment later on?
I'm not even a fan of planes so that's saying a lot.
However, I do think, that these numbers look too clean compared to the rest of the plane. Have you thought about creating a new layer beneath that red paint and filling it with the same colour as the one on the wings? Since your diffuse is fairly uniform you could mask the red paint and make it look as a part of the same UV island.
I hope you get what I'm trying to say here - I haven't slept in ages and can't even think properly anymore, haha
very nice.
You might want to tone down the specular highlights a bit - they're a bit strong which makes it look like plastic - paint is not that reflective
And this may have been a conscious decision, but it looks a little blue - references for that particular paint scheme seem to lean more towards a more desaturated blue/gray.
i.e. http://www.airliners.net/photo/Sweden---Air/Saab-JA37DI-Viggen/1341614/&sid=8d4d52824cb64131f8d56d9932a60a3a
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Sweden---Air/Saab-JA37D-Viggen/1630364/&sid=196fdc2e4b454df0f46a33ec1660d5c0
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Sweden---Air/Saab-JA37C-Viggen/1469054/&sid=8d4d52824cb64131f8d56d9932a60a3a
Oh and yeah the parts of the model with no grime simply haven't had any work done yet.
Thanks for the compliments and critique everyone!
Edit: Here are the references I'm using for color. I do have plenty which are grey, but I really like these blue ones, and I have corroborated my color choice with a modeling resource site:
I fixed the nose cone pitot, which was comically large before for some reason, and added grime to the rest of the aircraft. I also lowered the opacity on the wing numbers as per Xoliul, and I think it looks more integrated. I'm pretty satisfied with this thing right now, but please tell me if anything isn't to your liking guys.
Probably my favorite piece I've seen from you, and that's saying quite a lot since your other jets and helicopters are stunning.
The textures are just... WOW. Can you post your updated Texture Sheets if you're done with them?
Could you maybe describe how you made your panel seams? They are extremely well done.
Zanrok: I hand drew the seams in photoshop. In cases where there were seams or where I couldn't quite get nice lines due to surface curvature I drew some guide lines directly on the mesh using photoshop's 3d tools, and then drew the seams over those guide lines. Once I had finished all of the seams, I blew them up 200% and multiplied them over themselves a few times, ran nDo set to emboss, and extracted the innermost couple pixels of the resulting map by deleting the empty spots, selecting the seams, and contracting the selection. I sized the resulting map down to the original size and threw it in my normal map, using an overlay method to blend. The reason I did the blow up stuff is that baking maps at normal size tends to result in dodgier maps with very small details like panels.
Here are my finished maps, and a full-sized portions as well.
nice job!
Gonna look over your textures and try to use some your methods with my next texturing project. Insane stuff man!