[WIP] Ekranoplan - crazy russian waterplane
Hi guys,
Started this thing a while back but haven't had time to work on it much lately. Just started up again and thought a WIP thread might help keep me motivated. Progress will probably be reeeeallly slow, sorry, too much work during the day and I'm usually pretty tired by the time I get to work on my own stuff. I promise to finish eventually though!
The reference can be found here http://igor113.livejournal.com/51213.html.
The reference is amazing and I really can't thank the photographer enough. He's pretty much my hero.
So far I've just roughly blocked in the main shapes and have started detailing some areas that I felt like detailing, no real plan yet and none of the areas I've started on are finished. I'll probably try to nail down the body shape next so I don't run into too many problems with attaching things to it later.
The thing is gigantic and I'm not patient enough to line up images right now, so I'm sure I'll have some accuracy issues. Feel free to point them out and I'll do my best to fix them. All suggestions and critiques are more than welcome, of course.
Thanks for looking!
Started this thing a while back but haven't had time to work on it much lately. Just started up again and thought a WIP thread might help keep me motivated. Progress will probably be reeeeallly slow, sorry, too much work during the day and I'm usually pretty tired by the time I get to work on my own stuff. I promise to finish eventually though!
The reference can be found here http://igor113.livejournal.com/51213.html.
The reference is amazing and I really can't thank the photographer enough. He's pretty much my hero.
So far I've just roughly blocked in the main shapes and have started detailing some areas that I felt like detailing, no real plan yet and none of the areas I've started on are finished. I'll probably try to nail down the body shape next so I don't run into too many problems with attaching things to it later.
The thing is gigantic and I'm not patient enough to line up images right now, so I'm sure I'll have some accuracy issues. Feel free to point them out and I'll do my best to fix them. All suggestions and critiques are more than welcome, of course.
Thanks for looking!
Replies
It could just be the angle of your render but I think you've modelled the nose a bit wide. In the photos it seems to taper in more.
And are you going to build this as if it where new? or make it look like in the photos, in all its rust glory?
make sure, when you render it, you make it like your ref (to make it look big). because your perspective render is making it look normal size.
cool thing to model though
Do you plan on taking it the distance?
Good luck!
Are you planning on texturing it like the dilapidated one, or doing a proper functioning clean-ish version?
The Flying Monk - Thanks, I agree about the nose, I'll revisit the whole body next. I've mainly been putting it off because the whole body shape is probably the most important thing to get right and therefore will drive me the craziest. It's also a little confusing because in his ref he seems to be switching lenses between about 28mm and 110mm, so what I should really do is make some image planes and model to them, but I'm not sure I'll go that route. The plan is to eventually make it more beat up and rusty like the ref.
roosterMAP - I agree, ridiculous nose! I'll take another look and mess with the fov on my render camera as I work on the body/nose more.
motives - Haha, yeah, I think it only flies a few feet above water. Pretty interesting vehicle for sure. Thanks for the luck!
brandoom - Not sure how many hours so far, I never really know but I do know that I've been particularly slow so far on this one. I don't typically have time to work on stuff until around 11pm and lately I've been getting more tired than normal. Hard to get in a groove. For example, the past 3 days or so I've been detailing the back of the engine area (last render above), but it has only taken that long because it happens while I'm reading stuff online, eating, and thinking about getting ready for sleep! I'll definitely finish though, hopefully I can pick up speed on it soon.
Alberto Rdrgz - Check out other stuff on that livejournal I posted, the Russians have come up with some of the most awesome, crazy looking military vehicles ever.
MoP - Thanks! I think I'll go for dilapidated with a mudbox pass on all of the paneling at the end, but we'll see if it's worth it at that point. Already having a bit of a tough time deciding what to model in and what to leave out and I haven't even started on paneling yet. It's so big that it's really going to get out of hand polycount-wise, but I think I'm ok with that as long as my computer gives me its blessing
acapulco - I'll finish it for you one day! Promise!
Caspian sea monster
Always been fascinated by these :thumbup:
Can't wait to see more of this
hah
nice modeling so far!
Lonewolf - hey man! We've worked together, a long time ago through MB. I checked some of your new stuff out, looks great!
So I know I said this was going to be slow progress, but it's been even slower than expected. Been too busy, but had some more time to work on this over the weekend and messed with the body shape a bit more, started adding odds and ends randomly, but there's no real order to anything yet and pretty much all of the areas I've started aren't done.
I attached the engines to the body, but that'll need some massaging yet to get right, plus there are a few shapes that need to be cut out of that thing.
I narrowed the front end and tapered the nose more, hopefully it's closer to being correct now? Also made the engines smaller. I haven't messed with focal length to match images. I lined up one side shot to make sure my proportions are more or less right, but otherwise I'm just eyeballing it.
Here are a couple shots of the progress, sorry it's not further along yet! 2 more years and I'll be done!
This dash area looks a bit sparse, but hopefully when it's done with the rest of the protruding elements and paneling/rivets it'll hold up this close. It's gigantic though so we'll see.
Still need to add some internals to the engine backs, but started working on the connection with the body.
I wouldn't have the balls to model this myself.
Started detailing the engine tops, worked a little more on the front end, but not much. I'd say the front 1/4 is about 50% done now? Started throwing rivets around but haven't decided how many I'll end up with. Haven't touched the back 3/4 anymore since the last update. Not enough time
I'm aware of scale issues with the detail, some of which i'm planning to fix, some of which I'm probably going to give into in the spirit of actually finishing this thing at some point. But please feel free to point out problems, I promise to fix as much as I can.
Missile launchers.
Ground effect vehicles are very interesting IMO. You're off to a very good start with the modelling. Hope you finish it up
Yup, they're missile launchers. Pretty insane.
Vig - Thanks man. I go back and forth in my head pretty often on whether or not I'm going to do a lowres and textures. I'd like to, but I'm trying not to skimp on detail and it may get out of hand. When I find a balance hopefully it'll allow for a cool "low" res that is actually the poly count of a level.
MoP - Thanks
I still promise to finish one day
Awesome details man!
question tho, does this thing even fly? lol
Did that plane ever actually fly??!! Such a bizzare design!
http://www.moscowtopnews.com/?area=postView&id=886
"What if we put jets on a boat?"
"What if we put wings on the jet boat?"
"What if we make it really big?"
"What if we put giant ship busting missiles on it?"
Thanks for that link, Vig. Here's a video where it looks like some of those images are from. There are a few variations, but this one shows up at about 3:00 and you get to see it move at 4:00.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT7ewylPlAQ&feature=related#t=03m00s
edit: don't know why it took me this long to realize it, but the paneling behind the tubes are flame retardant for missile launches. Pretty crazy design.
You are doing a great job here mate.
Here's a giant-res version of the full side-front shot.
that is some serious dedication. Congrats on getting this far :P
Looking forward to more
Awesome work mate!!!
XOPOWO CDELANO TOBAPNW (COMRADE)
The rivets drove me a little crazy at times, I didn't really plan on doing them but seemed to keep adding more whenever I felt like an area was getting close to done. Some are placed by hand with Modo's tack tool (select rivet, click on surface you want to snap it to).
Most of the dense areas were done with the clone/array tools with the help of the work plane to get the right angle. If you're not familiar with Modo's work plane, basically you have the ability to temporarily move world space to any angle (and anywhere) you want. For example, you can highlight a face and set your work plane to it, which makes your transform tools and orthographic cameras work as if that face is 0,0,0 in your scene with the up axis perpendicular to the face. It's similar to what you can do with action centers, but a bit more robust because it works better with certain tools (clone) and it keeps the world orientation set that way until you want to change it again.
For most areas I'd create a square polygon and place/clone it in whatever pattern was needed (pretty simple with the help of work planes, though sometimes weird curvature makes it trickier and tacking them by hand is the way to go). Once I had a bunch of small square polys hovering over the area I wanted them, I could move them all locally downward with a geometry constraint on (prevents geo from moving through other geo) until they rested exactly on the surface underneath. Then extrude them all out a few millimeters and you've got a bunch of half-boxes that work as rivets when smoothed x2. For certain areas I could do a couple thousand rivets at a time like this, though there's no practical reason to ever make this many rivets I guess.
My stats list says there are 2.8 million tris in the scene when nothing is smoothed for rendering, but the render stats say it's rendering about 65 million when everything's double-smoothed (which doesn't add up). I've always been a bit confused by modo's poly counts so I don't really know which one is right. I haven't been very efficient though, and there are quite a few too many rivets, so I don't think there's as much going on as that poly count suggests.
SHE MIGHT FLY AGAIN!
Its cool to see you just go off on that thing.