Recon Drone

barnesy

My girlfriend was kind enough to give me a nice cold, instead of passing it on to everyone I decided to start this recon drone.

I haven't really had the chance to do much hard surface modelling in the past so this should be a good bit of practice



Much of it is just blocked out at the moment as I am still trying to figure out what to do with the bottom of the drone.

I want it to look functional and avoid loads of random clutter etc.

As for the front drone, I have added in extra edge loops for the gills on the side. I then duplicated the faces and made the fins as separate parts to see how it looks. I might make them out of the main fuselage but I think I will have lots of problems with the topology, what do you think?

Olli.

did you mean a nice cold beer?

and nice recon drone

mbischof

looks like a good start!

barnesy

Olli. - I must first overcome this severe case of man flu before I can drink beer again, in the meantime I will have to settle for toilet roll and cough sweets haha

mbischof - Thanks The calm before the storm that is baking and retopping

Update

I managed to make some more progress on this. Here are 2 images with my thoughts scribbled over them. Hopefully they will provide abit of a insight on the direction that I am planning on taking the model.






(The left hand side of the drone needs to be mirrored over to the right, so ignore any round blobs on the right)

As you can see I am thinking of possible shapes to add to the little arms as I am not sure if they look a bit primitive as just stretched boxes. At the same time I am thinking of the fragility of the arms and the underside of the drone itself, I am trying to avoid turning it into a gunship with arms.

I am torn between 1 and 2 at the moment.

Also I have been playing around with possible attachments for the arms. It's hard to add variation without it turning into a limp 2 finger claw like hand (which couldn't pick anything up) or a pair or scissors lol

The air brakes on the main body are just ideas, I am not sure if I will make them yet as it seems like extra clutter and extra tri's.


Edit- I just had a thought that the legs themselves could be used as landing gear, it would look like a strange flying spider! Also I thought that I could scrap those suggestions for the bottom of the drone and just work in some vents and metal seams etc.

barnesy

I managed to spend a couple of hours on the drone this morning. I am pretty happy with how it is looking now.



I managed to bulk up the arms, incorporate the gills to the body itself which works alot better. I have also mirrored it across etc.

I still need to make a few tweaks here and there, like the smoothing on the big leg armour pad etc.

Once that is done it will be a case of taking the hp parts into zbrush and adding Armour seams etc. I will also create a paint over so that you know the style I am going for with the textures etc.

I am hoping it isn't too tri heavy as there are alot of stuff going on along with wires etc

Xoliul

I think your main shapes: wings and body, are not defined enough yet. They feel soft and as if you're not fully controlling the Turbosmooth there. Try to add some definition and contrast in curves to make it more believable.

Rednaz

Nice start, I think you can get away with using an alpha map for the smaller wires.
May I ask what this shape is for?


To me it looks like its suppose to be a hover engine like this

But it doesnt have the blades in between.

Good luck

barnesy

@ Xoliul - And there I was thinking that a few seams would do the job lol

I see what you mean it looks too smooth, not really very metal like.
Here is a little paint over of my plan of action.



@ Rednaz - Thanks man. As for the fan things I was planning on making them into some weird sci fi plasma generator thingymajigs like the weapon for gordon Vogts Hunter -



I did originally plan on putting fans in there but theres already bendts at the front ,I will have to play around with it and see what looks best I guess.

barnesy

Hey guys here is a update. I have managed to further define the main shapes as Xoliul suggested. I am thinking about tweaking the rear pads wither side of the main engine they seem too square compared to the rest of the drone



Do you think it I should make the center of the body more angular? It looks too smooth at the moment in contrast to the angular wings and pointy arms etc.

barnesy

Ignore the last post. I made some further tweaks to it such as adjusting the jet thrusters , played around with the position of the plasma generators as well as adding in some extra edge loops to the main body to break it up.
Sadly I will not be able to work on it till tomorrow. Hopefully I will be able to get it into ZBrush as long as there are no major issues you fellow polycounters would like to see addressed.



I made a before and after to show it.

barnesy

I decided to give the gym a miss today as the rain and left over man flu didnt agree with each other.






Seeing as a lot of the model was instanced I thought I would try and get the low poly model done so that I can get moving on with other stages tomorrow. It is currently around 85,000 tri's. It shouldnt be too hard to cut down the count. I was thinking of removing the geo from the plasma cores, cutting down the geo of the pipes sticking out of the back. Another massive saver would be to reduce the amount of geo in to wires as each of them currently have 7 sides.

barnesy

Hey guys, I have finished the retop, it is now down to 18,000 tri's.
That 85,000 was due to a renegade turbosmoothed object.



I played around with the steps on the wires and decided to go for 4 steps instead of 3 as it only added 500 tri's but really helps the silhouette.



I am hoping that I can get the unwrap finished by tomorrow. Most of it can be mirrored so it shouldnt take too long Then I can get some paint overs on the go.

barnesy

Had a chance to get some more work done on this. I have just finished the unwrap. Still need to play around with it to incerease the efficency. I was going to leave a small part free for alpha wires for some of the smaller parts.





(EDIT - note to self- make sure to check for overlapping UV islands before uploading images and making yourself look like a noob)

barnesy

I have finally wrapped up all of the uni stuff and continued working on the Recon Drone.



I made a quick colour blockout to see what it looked like.

I am in the process of adding more detail to the normals and cleaning them up in general,then I can start adding detail to the diffuse etc. Once that is done then it will be UDK ahoy for some emissive fun time for the camera lens and engines etc

Hang10

I like the colors. The comment about the UV was funny too :P

respawnrt

Nice, i'd sugest to search on Cgtextures the keyword "aircraft" and find many hires textures with fuselage that i think, if you take inspiration (and also use some ) will really help you to sell your litle drone shading wise.

barnesy

Hang10 - Thanks man

respawnrt - Thanks for the tip, I had a look on there and theres some pretty awesome pics. It has deffinatly inspired me with all the military stickers etc and the design of the aircradft themselves.

SasoChicken - Thanks , I did try having him a really dark green with nice contrasting lights , but I bailed on it and as there wasnt enough contrast between the green and grey.



I had a go at coming up with some differenct colour variations for you. Just had a thought that a tan model might look cool, like the Starwars attack of the clone droids. I will post one up when I get abit more of the other stuff texturing stuff finished off.

Rednaz

Nice, I personally like #1 #2 and #6 the most

barnesy

Thanks guts. I think I will stick with the white and red one then

I managed to get the normal map finished today and make a good start on the other textures. I still need to sort the cable normal map and design. I will post some ideas on here as to what I am thinking.

Here it is anyway

respawnrt

You have problems with the normal map and seams .Check your settings and all and your hipoly bevels are crazy small.Just something to keep in mind for next time .

barnesy

Thanks respawnrt, you are totally right.

I have manged to play around with it and sort out most of the seams. Some of the errors were also down to a mess up in with the smoothing groups

The bevels are a killer too, in ZBrush I made sure they were massive but once they were baked they were only like 2px wide!

-Update-

I have managed to get it into UDK and set up with the emissive etc and its starting to get there. Just need to sort out the numbers mirroring with decals, add some stickers etc to it as well as some wear and tear. I am quite liking the clean look at the moment so I do not want to rough it up too much.

I also need to get some better cube map reflections as well as the mini cloud thing isn't really working as well as it could.

I have been playing around with some of the maps to see how it looks in context.



(Every asset, apart from the Drone, is owned by Epic)

If there is anything that is making you rage (apart from me spamming the thread), please say and I will see if I can sort it out

barnesy

Just a small update on the texturing , I have started adding some grunge etc.



I don't think I had my head screwed on right when I thought that I would be able to use decals to avoid the inverted mirrored numbers.




I have ticked both the accept static and dynamic decals for the skeletal mesh, yet it still refuses to project.

I am thinking of either removing both the numbers from the wings altogether or replacing them with a mirror friendly number like 8 , but I hope that wouldnt be too much of a obvious workaround.

Can anyone suggest a solution? it is driving me insane haha as it is 07 , then 70 on the other side xD

Snader

I suggest you mirror the 'chin' of the robot, that piece on the bottom near the lens/dome. This should give you enough space to copy the currently inverted 07 text and make that unique and un-mirrored.

barnesy

SasoChicken - Thanks man , I was thinking of just an 8 without the 0, but it would look more like a football player than a drone haha.

As for the jagged edges it might be down to the resolution of the images , I will grab some more for you later today. I am in the process of making a really simple environment to plonk it in.

Snader - Now why didn't I think of that?! Great idea, I will see what I can do. Hopefully the polygon Gods do not throw too much seam chaos my direction.

I should hopefully be able to get an update ready today.

barnesy

Here is a update with the environment I have made to pimp the Drone.
I managed to get the entire enviro into 1 2048x2048 sheet.



The diffuse is just a colour blockout at the moment. I am also in the process of adding some decals in to break it up a bit.

respawnrt

Much better than that udk scene .Maybe you could have some hard shadows in there ?.Dunno lots of enviro artists who could weight on this.Maybe fade the light power a bit in the tunnel end so you have the accent on the first drone ?

barnesy

Thank you respawnrt

Your paint over looks much better, I am really liking the light coming from the panels and the shadows.

I need to do some research into environment lighting as I broke my last scene lol I added a spot light in for each of the panels which burnt out the lighting and I couldn't get rid of the light bake. I even deleted every light in the scene and it stayed baked :O

I also need to find out how to add more colour to the decals as I was trying to get the red the same colour as the stripes on the Drone,

barnesy

Here is another update. The environment is practically finished now. I am contemplating filling in the lights and removing the dark parts that are caused by the gradient, what do you guys think?






I am now going to focus on finishing up the textures and then creating some sort of camera fly through to show it off.

barnesy

I have posted this in technical talk , and I thought that I would try my luck posting it on this thread aswell.

I found this nice little tutorial about making custom cubemaps but mine doesnt seem to work properly

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Zh3qDyXOY"]Chrome Material (Part 1) - UDK Tutorials by Javahawk - YouTube[/ame]

THe technique I followed starts at about 2 minutes into the vid.

In the newer versions of UDK it doesnt have the RenderToTextureCube so I have had to try using either TextureRenderTarget2D or TextureRenderTargetCube.

I tried using the TextureRenderTarget2D as it created the same green picture that he used in the tut , but I could not apply it to my sphere for some reason



I could apply the TextureRenderTargetCube though , but it created very strange results.


If any of you can offer any suggestions, with regards to both the cubemap and the scene itself, please shout as I am trying get to this finished up today then start some sculpting practice.

Thanks

barnesy

Hey guys , here are the finished renders

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tlkTwG2gIao






















I hope you like them