Hello Everyone!
I’ve been working on an M1A1 Abrams tank model. Just finished up texture mapping it. It weighs in at 788 polygons and 1 512 x 512 texture map.
Anyways, if anyone wants to make any comments, suggestions or criticisms I would appreciate it. This is my first low poly model so it’s been quite a learning experience, that’s for sure. 
Thank!
. . . Kim
this really looks cool. but…
try to paint in photoshop (or whatever you’re useing) shadows on parts that are ‘inward’ ,meaning, where the light that hit surfaces is not so bright because that surface is under something, for example the surfaces that face toward the ground or where the turet joins tne main hull.
Kind of faking radiosity with textures.
Make some renders with skydome to see where to put verry soft shadows.
Thanks lwkriss,
I will be able to do that on some parts, but not on others. Basically, the wheels and the edges of the treads, those all share one area of the texture map. So those I won’t be able to put into shadow. But the other parts I will. Like the wheels are mapped both to the inside and the outside. Here, I’ll put the map here so you can see what I’m talking about.
Also, I put a light underneath the tank for my renders so that the underside texture mapping can be seen.
Like I said, being my first low poly model and all, I really appreciate the help!
. . . Kim
its a nice low poly tank, but i would change a few things .
make the gun barrel round (5 to 8 sided cylinder). it will add very little to your poly count and look a ton better. the coaxel side mount machine gun can be a 4 sided tube, but i dont think the main gun should be.
add a few boxes and misc stuff to the top of the turret, again it will add to the poly count, but overall it will not effect performance. All M1’s have a tradmark air sensor at the very rear of the turret, i would add this. They also have a laser targeting sight on the top right side (its nothing more than a box). all are worth adding IMO. Only the M1A2’s have the second targeter (commanders sight)
the maps are good, but dont show enough detail IMO. add several little boxes and stroked selections to the top, add rivits along the edges of some of these boxes. this is consistant with all the misc. parts a tank would have.
be sure to remove any and all polygons that are not seen from the outside, like the bottom of a hatch or whatever (you may of already done this, but its good to check)
as far as the profile of the tank, it looks like an M1 with one exception. the nose of your tank drops down too fast IMO. the area of the motor carrage in front of the turret should be almost flat.
If you can run an alpha channel in your app, you can take the ‘supply shelf’ off the side of the tank texture and make a simple box with the top and bottom removed and move it to be just over your turrets bounding box. the area between the rails can be alpha’d out and this would look better.
If i have time today, ill mess with tweaking your map and post the results. You may or may not like the results but its always good to see others work (well, thats how i learned 
)
edited for spelling
CADster
back … uh, i see i got the map revised before anyone posted …
I dont have the time to do it all (much easier to do it if the model is in front of ya, and faster). but this might give you a good idea.
if you look you can see I added a little detail. a few stroked boxes and shapes is all that done. some are blurred, some are not. rivits are nothing more than one pixel dots. I added the shading under the turret as well.
maybe this will help.
CADster
Wow Cadster - thanks for all that feedback! That’s really nice of you . . .
This was for a test, of sorts, so I was limited to 800 polygons. So I had 12 polygons to spare in this model. 
But yeah, after I thought about it I realized that the square main gun wasn’t such a good idea.
The images I had to work with were pretty good for like the side, back and front shots, but there wasn’t much at all to go by when it came to doing the top - only one image and it wasn’t a very good one at that.
And thanks for the tweaked map as well! I downloaded it to have a closer look at it.
Just as FYI’s, the side of the tank is a photo, the front lights and the back lights were grabbed from photos, the vents on the back were from some other photos of vents that I had laying around in my collection and I grabbed 1 section of a tank tread from a photo and duplicated it across my tread polys. The wheels were hand made in Photoshop and all the rest of the embellishments and doodads were done in Photoshop.
Again - thank you so much for all your input! Like you said - it is so helpful to have others to learn from since I don’t know too many people in the game industry . . .
Later!
. . . Kim
Well I finally got a chance to go back and muck with the tank textures some more. Took Cadsters advice and added more deely-bobs to areas of the tank. And someone also had suggested that I add “edges” to the edges of the pieces-parts so I did that. Just made the edges dark for the most part but then added little specular highlights on the edges here and there as well.
Okay, so, if anyone cares to comment that would be great. If not, that’s okay too.
Later!
. . . Kim
Edited to add image. D’oh!
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