Vehicle WIP: ARH Tiger

[Cronium]

Hi
It's har to crit meshes at this state, but i'll try. Spontanously it feels like it's got lesser tris than you say it has. I believe the reason for this is an uneven polygon distribution. Areas that need more work is in this case around the cockpit and even a little bit inside. The chairs look good but i miss a dashboard and steering joystick. Also the body would look better if you let the edge that crosses it go straigh back and spit the other one up.

keep it coming, it's good work!

[LoTekK]

Thanks for the comments, Cronium. The cockpit in those shots was barely started, just managed to throw in some seats, but hadn't gotten started on the instrument panels yet. I've spent some time today optimizing the mesh, cutting, welding, etc, and then starting working on the more obvious details. I've fleshed out the cockpit a little more now, and the gunner now has instrument panels but no joystick (the pilot doesn't have anything just yet).

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-6.jpg

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-7.jpg

Various angles, smooth shaded (http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-8.jpg)

New tricount is 3827. I've been given a tri budget of around 4k, so I'll have to optimize some more tomorrow.

Also the body would look better if you let the edge that crosses it go straigh back and spit the other one up.
Any chance you could visually highlight the edge you're referring to? I'm not quite sure which one you mean. Do you mean have another edge going lengthwise across the main body in order to round the shape out a bit?

[retardedmonkey]

One thing that might make this more complex...or even just more interesting, would be make the windows not all one window. Why not add the parts of the chopper that come down and around the windows...hopefully that makes sense. If this chopper doesnt have that then just ignore me haha.

Also your mesh seems very basic (the actual body) and their is an edge running down the center of everything, it doesnt seem like it is used to round anything off at all either. So why not just weld that over....of course you might be using symetry..

Anyways the m0del looks good so far :D Keep it up!

[LoTekK]

I'm considering building the framework around the cockpit, but I'll probably leave that to the end, once my tri count is a little more stable. If I can't afford to model the framework, I'll likely just leave it to textures.

As for the center line, you guessed right, it's for the virtual mirror. Being that the chopper is relatively "flat" around the centerline, I'll be able to kill a fair number of tris once I finalize the mesh and kill most of the edges going around the center.

Oh, and just to get it out of the way, how do people typically go about unwrapping something like this? Since I've never really done anything mechanical of this complexity, I'm a little unsure of how to go about it once I get to that point.

[SHEPEIRO]

i think the problem so far is that you need to spend a few more polys, getting the smoothing right on the main body, everything else looks good, you can optimise a few then add some more edge loops hrizontally on the side of the body, the two edge loops going along the bottom corner, deffinatly need to be continueus (SP) as at mo they break at the nose and cause shading prob here, you also have another shading prob under engine pod.

fix this and you got a nice looking chopper,

[LoTekK]

Hey, thanks for pointing out the smoothing errors at the nose and under the engine pod, I hadn't noticed those before. I fixed up the one at the nose, but only managed to somewhat alleviate the one under the engine. No matter what I did with the mesh, whether it was cutting new edges, removing edges, turning edges, moving verts, etc, I couldn't get rid of it completely. Even when I making the two quads completely planar didn't get rid of it. :hmm:

Anyways, been doing a fair bit of optimizing, cutting down polies in the various components, as well as removing circumference loops in the main body that weren't contributing much to the silhouette. Managed to cut in a complete loop lengthwise, and a couple extra edges here and there to shape. I've also added a bunch of other stuff, like the cockpit cage, radio antenna, and weapons on the racks. Also fleshed out the cockpit with panelling and joysticks. I'm still tweaking, and haven't welded the halves yet, so the centerline is still there. I should be able to save a lot of tris once I finalize the mesh and weld together.

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-14.jpg

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-10.jpg

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-11.jpg

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-12.jpg

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-13.jpg

Anyone have any tips on unwrapping something like this? I started unwrapping some of the components, and I'm about to die from all the crap that needs careful unwrapping. :argh:

[Neil]

i'd like to see this textured.
you have some wasted loops on the blades, btw.

[LoTekK]

Good eye, Neil. I don't know how those loops got there. Fixed.

Well unwrapping this bastard is proving quite the learning experience. :crazy:

Anyways, optimized the hell out of the mesh, in particular finalizing the mesh and getting rid of the edges running down the centerline of most of the components and the main body. I think I'm at under 4100 tris without weapons, and 4900 with weapons. Most of it is unwrapped, aside from the cockpit frame (which is proving quite the nightmare), and still finalizing the layout.

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires2-final.jpg

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-uv2.jpg

Whoops, got a little too careful about the layout, evidently. :D

http://www.lotekk.com/files/arh-tiger_auv.gif

Ortho wires and UV:
Ortho wires (http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-wires-final.jpg)
Ortho with UV overlay (http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-uv1.jpg)

I'm either going to reorganize the current UV layout to give some components more texture space, or I'm just going to stick the cockpit UVs in the same sheet. The wingstub-mounted weapons each have their own sheet.

[LoTekK]

Right, this has driven me completly batty. I've never had to lay out this many little itty bits before. :argh: Think this is about as efficient as I'm ever going to get it before thoughts of defenestration set in.

http://www.lotekk.com/files/arh-tiger_auv-final.gif

That's everything in there, including the cockpit internals. Now to hand the model off to the other guys so they can get it config'd, while I start working on the textures.

[Cronium]

havn't had time to answer, but you solved the edge by yourself and it looks great ;)

try to bake an ambient occlusion light map as a guide. It will help you a lot when you're texturing!

[LoTekK]

havn't had time to answer, but you solved the edge by yourself and it looks great ;)

try to bake an ambient occlusion light map as a guide. It will help you a lot when you're texturing!
Cheers. :) It's been one hell of a learning experience, but I've been on some kind of crazy productivity streak, so I figured I'd capitalize. :)

Wings unfortunately doesn't have any facilities to bake any sort of textures (aside from manual vertex coloring). Come to think of it, though, I think Blender can do that. I'll have to dig it out again, haven't touched that app in months. :p Thanks for the suggestion, will definitely try that out.

[LoTekK]

Had a ton of issues with the transparency sorting due to engine limitations, so I had to move the translucent canopy parts and the optics dome to separate, smaller sheets. Couldn't be arsed to redo the UVs for the body, though, and the mod leader's really on my ass about getting this done, so I've got a bit of wasted texture space. Anyways, started on the textures. So far it's a combination of photo source and heavy hand painting. I'll be using a single 2048^2 texture, plus smaller textures for the canopy (256^2), optics dome (128^2), and decals (32x64 and 64^2). The screnshot shows the body with a 1024^2 texture, though, because the conversion from TGA at 2048 takes more than 5 minutes, with CPU usage at 100%. :argh:

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-tex2.jpg

[LoTekK]

Didn't manage to get too much done tonight aside from some detailing, cleanup, and color correction, but the bird doesn't look quite so naked now that I've thrown some base paint on most of the rest of it. :D

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-tex3.jpg

[retardedmonkey]

I like it so far...but why this camo scheme? Did they say this color scheme or is it your choice? I would say go for the olive drab type color. I see you rigged it as well...this is a real noob question but how did you do that...if your using max...cuz im gonna have to do that soon and I wanna know how to do it. I just need to add by element but I cant...

Anyway its looking good. Oh yeah wat resolution is your texture at?

[LoTekK]

Thanks, man. :)

This camo scheme is how the ADF actually paints the 22 Tigers they purchased. My guess is it suits their terrain well, from the reference photos I've looked at. I kinna like this scheme actually. It's kinna sexy. :p

Not sure what you meant by rigging it, unless you meant the extra rotor blades (blurred), headlights, and muzzle flash. If you meant that, those are just extra bits of geometry that subsequently get defined in the game's proprietary modelling program. I haven't gotten around to doing that, because it's a huge pain in the ass. :argh: All of those bits were modelled and imported together with the chopper, though.

The source texture is a single 2048^2 sheet, but the above shots are using 1024^2. Based on the distance of the camera to the model, though, they've probably mipped down to 512^2. The final product will use the single 2048 sheet. There are also a few smaller textures, ranging from 32x64 to 256x256 for the decals and canopy glass, due to engine (internal texture format) limitations with translucent textures.

Oh, forgot to mention that the textured shots are from Oxygen Light, the aforementioned proprietary modelling app required to get the models in-game.

[LoTekK]

Well, I seem to have hit that pesky point of diminishing returns, with regards to time spent vs output gained. :hmm: Anyways:

http://www.lotekk.com/files/adf-arh-tiger-tex4.jpg

[ill_logic]

sorry, with the servers being busy, i essentially ended up double posting without realizing. this can be deleted.

-J

[ill_logic]

hey there

i wrote a couple things, clicked submit & the server was busy, so going back i lost it all so let me try to think what i wrote.

i think it's a good model, especially if it's your very first attempt at vehicle. as for the camo scheme, i like the colors, but the orange bits look a bit too vivid to me. maybe try desaturating those colors just a slight bit? just to see how it looks. the muzzle flare has some alpha that looks like it needs a little bit of adjustment or else it gets a little too dark at the edges or something. i know you probably want to move past the point of modeling but if it were me, i think i'd lay in a cylinder coming out of the barrel in a bit of a cone shape (one row of verts bigger than the other). i think it might help with the illusion of it firing out.

i think there was something else too, but i just woke up & i forget what it was. keep up the good work, can't wait to see the weapons textured

-J

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