Combat Drone (WIP)

Kimon · Jun 2014

LATEST UPDATE:

Yo polycounters! I'm calling this done now. Really satisfied with the outcome, hope someone else will like it

Thanks for stopping by!

ORIGINAL THREAD:

Good evening everyone! Decided to take this guy further and been working away on it for a good while today:

Heavily based on this Combat Drone concept from Homefront, which in itself is heavily based on SWORDS/TALON-robots so I'm taking my references from them aswell!

Ofc still a lot to do and I'm well aware of the difference in edge thickness at the moment, gotta take care of that, but it's nice to get some feed back somewhat early!

Also, my first time making treads and I'm a little bit worried about unwrapping them, or, not the unwrapping itself but rather how do it 'the right way', so if anyone got some nice tips and tricks for those let me know!

Trevor · Jun 2014

Looking great. Can you please show some reference pics as there's not much to compare it to at the moment. I cant tell if you are mixing designs or basing the model off a singular drone.

I would start unwrapping the treads by doing planar projections on the sides then unwrap all the upward facing sides into one or two linear strips. The sides of the treads will keep there shape and you can pack lesser sized uv islands in between them.

skyline5gtr · Jun 2014

Great start, love the feel keep going more detail please

Kimon · Jun 2014

@Trevor

Thanks, and of course! It's not just a single one.
The main one is without a doubt the left one here:

151727179.5NVAPZEc.jpg

However that concept picture didn't have too much smaller details, so I'm also looking att stuff like this:

To see where they put the screw holes in real life etc.

Really just searching google for "SWORDS / TALON / COMBAT DRONE" and picking stuff I like.

@skyline5gtr

Thanks man! More detail incoming

Kimon · Jun 2014

Small update:

Some areas are still painfully empty, especially the back, ah well, will hopefully find something cool to put there

And later, after the bakening and everything, I will probably run a last detail pass in nDo and add in stuff I feel is missing.

Kimon · Jun 2014

Felt like working on the low poly for a bit..

Really love making nice and continuous low poly meshes, probably my favorite part of the whole process

Saves texture space, waaay easier to bake and they also look pretty cool I think!

stevston89 · Jun 2014

Looking really nice. Pesronally I don't think you need more details. Once you get all of the ware and any paint details on there it will look great. More details will just clutter the design.

Kimon · Jun 2014

Thanks man! Yea I hope so

Will probably add some small stuff after that's too tedious to do with floaters.

Did a quick dirty test bake with the geomtry I got so far, everything connected and continuous, sits at ~1300 tris which I think is OK. Some questionable smoothing and parts missing, but that will be sorted out, hopefully ^^

Kimon · Jun 2014

More or less done with the retopo and test baking, and will begin the real uv-mapping and baking process pretty soon.

Sits at ~9800 tris right now, will probably do some more optimization and I will add more detail!

Also thinking about adding some kind of headlights in the front, not sure about that yet though.

Kimon · Jun 2014

Also, the treads are made up from two instances that are used something like 20-30 times around the tracks. That way they get some variation but still take up as little texture space as possible. They rotate around perfectly by being attached to a spline.

Really didn't want to make them completely flat and use a seperate tiling texture so this was the best I could come up with. Getting splines into game engines is usually really easy so what do you think? OK way of doing it?

Vailias · Jun 2014

normally for tread animations I see them move the space of one link and simply loop. That way you can have other bones, like for having the bogies and treads react to the environment layer on more easily.
I may be a bit out of touch, but I've never seen a game engine that supports portions of a model constrained to splines. Most of them require bones for object motion.

Kimon · Jun 2014

Thanks for the answer!

I understand. I'm not planning on putting this one in an actual game engine with working treads but it would still be fun to make it somewhat usuable. Someone should really make a good current gen tutorial about treads!

all the ones I can find are just using panning textures which seems a little bit old school.

Kimon · Jun 2014

UV's and most of the baking done! Some stuff turned out better than others and there's still a bit of detail I would like to get in there

Kimon · Jun 2014

Started texturing today! Still very much a WIP

Filcomet · Jun 2014

Congrats! Nice work!!

Kimon · Jun 2014

Yo polycounters! I'm calling this done now. Really satisfied with the outcome, hope someone else will like it

Thanks for stopping by!

Kimon · Jun 2014

@Filcomet Thanks man! means a lot.

People seem utterly uninterested in this one

Personally I think the texture work on this one is my best yet but perhaps I've become a bit blinded by working on it? Would be awesome to know what other people think.

menjah · Jun 2014

I guess Polycount is slow lately :P
I think it looks really great! I think it would benefit from a fairly simple gloss map, the gloss seems fairly even across the whole model right now and adding some really subtle patchy noise or sharp contrast between materials would look awesome.

Is this rendered in Marmoset?

Kimon · Jun 2014

@menjah

Thanks for the input, and yea, I totally see what you mean about the gloss!
It's actually rendered in the new 3DO, but not textured with the new ddo. I noticed that you can start the 3DO as stand alone and just load in whatever mesh and maps you want.

They got some really nice lightning presets which makes it more intuitive than marmoset in my opinion

Combat Drone (WIP)

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