Tyranid Fleshborer WIP - When bullets don't get the job done, fire beetles!
Hey all,
I'll try and be brief (cos I have a habit of writing too much). I've been making a Tyranid Fleshborer (for those uninitiated in Warhammer 40K, it's the gun held by this guy: http://www.fightingtigersofveda.com/fbtermie.JPG).
I wanted to make an unusual gun, so I went for this Tyranid one; the short explanation of it is that it's a living, fleshy hive, fused directly onto a Termagant's arm, that fires...beetles. They bore into the target and die inside them.
Anyway I've put my low-polys below, and obviously any and all crit is welcome. I've modelled it for use in FPS games; the low-poly comes in at 4882 tris. To make it a tad clearer, I've assumed that someone has hacked the arm off the alien in order to steal the gun.
I'll post better reference images of the gun when I have them - I modelled the weapon using a plastic miniature I have as a reference.
I'll try and be brief (cos I have a habit of writing too much). I've been making a Tyranid Fleshborer (for those uninitiated in Warhammer 40K, it's the gun held by this guy: http://www.fightingtigersofveda.com/fbtermie.JPG).
I wanted to make an unusual gun, so I went for this Tyranid one; the short explanation of it is that it's a living, fleshy hive, fused directly onto a Termagant's arm, that fires...beetles. They bore into the target and die inside them.
Anyway I've put my low-polys below, and obviously any and all crit is welcome. I've modelled it for use in FPS games; the low-poly comes in at 4882 tris. To make it a tad clearer, I've assumed that someone has hacked the arm off the alien in order to steal the gun.
I'll post better reference images of the gun when I have them - I modelled the weapon using a plastic miniature I have as a reference.
Replies
A few things I noticed...You didn't sculpt the eye in there, gonna do that in the highpoly for baking? I think it would be neat to have separate geo for the eyeball and get a nice shader on it. Alternatively you could skip the eye (I notice a lot of people shave the eyes off on their guns on the models as they look kinda silly)
Another thing is it looks like you have a bone sticking out of a fleshy arm. Tyranids have exo skeletons so you might want to have a look at some crustacean reference to really get that hard exterior and gooey fleshy interior
But how come you decided to model the entire thing as one piece?
If you are doing a high poly, it might be easier for you to have separate pieces so you can explode it for the bakes.
That's just how I would do it..
You're going to need to retopologise before you do much in the way of sculpting - those long thin polys and poles are going to be a pain to work with.
Selaznog; Yeh, the eye is kind of silly, but I don't remove it from my models. I was planning to work it into the sculpt, but hopefully make it into some sort of pulsating/faintly-glowing boil rather than an eye. Also, your point about the exoskeleton makes a lot of sense; I admittedly gave myself some leeway on that bit, but I'll definitely look into crustacean references and see about remodelling it - thanks for the idea! Also, yeh, really looking forward to doing the sculpt - that's where I get to play with all the grisly organic details that make Tyranids interesting.
Moosebish; I modelled it as one piece because it felt more fitting with the organic shape, but in the process I did think that some areas might need to be separated when baking - I'll take that on board.
Jackablade; Ahhhhh the classic concept - I didn't think of making the older, pointier versions, but I have my old Codex somewhere that must have a wealth of images like that. I have a modified version of the gun for sculpting on; I still need to add more loops to some areas, but it should be much better for sculpting than the low-poly.
You're also using too many polies in certain areas; the fang/horn on the front of the magazine is smoothed a lot into the mag and it doesn't really need to be; the eye socket (?) is lumpy and probably uses too many polies as well.
Overally it's a neat start and a challenging subject. My biggest advice would be not to be afraid of modeling stuff as separate components and just sinking them into each other. The guards on top of the mesh especially would benefit from this.
Good luck and keep at it!
To answer your query, the socket-thing is what the creature's other arm would connect into, but it's been torn out at the wrist.
Nonetheless I take your point about the wavy lines and peculiar smoothing issues, so I'll do my best to rectify that. I'll also separate some of the components to make life easier when it comes to baking.
Anyway I'll keep this page updated with my progress, expect more images soon!
Also it looks like your poly density is pretty inconsistent right now, as though the model is a hybrid between a high and low poly mesh. A lot of your bevels don't need to be there because they're too close in proximity to really effect the silhouette and the normal map will help them to catch the light. Attached is a picture focusing on poly density and in the middle is a crudely drawn box of what the wireframe could look like if the geo was separated and intersecting instead of connecting.
And to answer your question from your other thread about the prank pulled on the girls, yes it's absolutely true. My cousin was one of the guys and they went on to make the prank even more elaborate by having the crazies confront the girls (while one of them was in on it) but none of that part was relevant to the blood description
The higher-poly images I posted were of the version of the model I'd edited to take into a sculpting package, hence the excess geometry. However that model still needs to be tweaked as others have pointed out.
In response to the prank, wow. If their goal was to give those girls nightmares for years to come then I imagine that they succeeded. I wish I knew anyone with the motivation to help me pull a stunt like that; as I recall at university we once considered all wearing clown costumes on Halloween, in order to utterly terrify one of our more annoying flatmates who was scared of clowns. In the end we deemed it to be too mean (and too expensive).
Anyway the exploded mesh so far is below, I'm hoping to complete that today before preparing my other mesh for sculpting.
To clarify, I decided to highlight the organic nature of the gun by giving it some nasty-looking boils that had infected the gun and compromised the chitinous plating. I also tried to make the forward hand look like it'd originally been separate and then later become fused into the weapon, as the concept art posted by Jackablade shows that the hand can, at some point, be separate from the weapon.
Anyway I'll keep updating this thread as things progress - hopefully I'll get more time to work on this in the coming evenings.
I've also added a bit of surface detail based on reference images of beetle shells.