3D Fighting Machine Model

[mrgrotey]

nerfy: yeah i like people to see just what goes into making these images, its a hell of a lot more work than it seems to the 'uneducated' for want of a better phrase. thanks man

the donal: got yer PM ill see what i can do when im done with what im aiming for. glowy eyes? hmm... ill look into it, see what it comes out like. thanks for the suggestion

stuuuuuuuuuuulla: haha thanks 'kin 'ell! thats a big sig picture!

CT: hehe thanks im really running short of different ways to thank people without sounding repetitive haha.

GoA: thanks for the kind comments means alot, i didnt notice at the time that this was the first postyou made after joining the forum, that means a lot also.

to answer you questions:

1. i started off with a sphere


scaled it to fit the ref images i had


then remove the top and bottom faces so i had to rings of faces (the central, equatorial edge i used for the seam going around the fornt of the MFM body)


here is a link to the ref images i used, hopefully they will be a better resolution than your and will help you out.

www.thewaroftheworlds.com/messageboard/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=1&messageid=19832#bm19846

yeah those eye rims, hmm they bugged me for ages, if you look again at the first page, you see in the first couple of images they look simply GASTLY! and by the time i posted the textured eyes further down i had improved them a lot, but there was quite a bit of work in them, tricky little blighters the way i did them was to (and im speaking in 3ds max language now, oh hang on thats what you are using ) draw a spline object over the blank body then shapemerge it onto it so it cuts out the rough shape, i then inset the eye area, extruded the 'frame' and played about with it until the cows came home

regarding the legs, i believe they are a kind of 360° gimbal jointed thing when they get to the body but at the time (and for reasons of animation simplicity i opted to go for a ball joint, however wrong that may be)

and yeah obviouslythat scene was just to sort out the lighting, having a white scene lets you see the lighting more accuratey without the distraction of the different colour tones.

cheers for the interest mate



Right im back with a funky new avatar i made a few days ago

Sorry about this but im really advancing at an incredibly slow rate now im doing the environment, im now having to render this scene in three different files (foreground, mid ground and background) at its become far to heavy for my computer to take, standing at the moment at 1,200,000 tris unsmoothed (if you understand what i mean by that, if you dont then it means lots of detail for my measly computer to think about



heres yet another work in progress shot still with a lot of work ahead of me,





heres list of the main things to do on the scene still...

(this is for my benefit as an online 'to-do list' as much as showing you lot what i need to do)

1. The houses on the hill need doing, the house on hte far left need more bloody read weed climing over them, (that and the ivy is what takes up the main chunk of memory in the scene)

2. The lighting sucks (to coin an american phrase, too long i have been on my 3ds max forums with the yanks ) will need to improve that drastically to make this scene interesting as its pretty flat at the moment.

3. The road will be proper cobbles rather than the flat crappy texture it has now, again that takes a hell of a lot of memory to render and realy needs to be done on its own and composited as a different layer like the foreground .etc

4. There will be dust and debris coming out of the stamped on house as hes lifting his leg out (I say 'his' but suppose 'it' would be more apt really haha)

5. Also the cannon being rolled down the street will hopefully have dust kicked up behind it.

6. A gun and a cannon here and there will have just gone off so there will be some nice smoke effects there hopefully

7. The heat ray is a quick photoshop botch-up just so i could have something there as i didnt render that this time. but that will be the same as my previous post.

8. There will be a house light on here and there,

9. The grass around the edges wil be improved as its too light at the mo.

10. There will be some sort of scattered trees/forest/wood going on on the horizon to break that up a tad

11. A couple of falling green flamed cylinders wiil occupy the sky in the distance so thats not so empty

12.if im really in the mood i might make the parson holding up his cross to the MFM and a little easter egg for you WOTW nuts You may notice that there is a distinct lack of general public in the scene, and as its a lot of work to make people, i cant promise there will be any more. (id love to have women running about screaming and just a general state of panic, but i dont want to run out of steam on this image by biting off more than i can chew)

13. i will be varying the hair colour of the soldiers so they not so obviously clones.

14. may add a hint of a wisp of smoke coming from the house chimneys (im making this stuff up as i go here )



any more suggestions to the list will always be considered and appreciated.

any other comment are welcome of course.

cheers

p.s. WOW thats a lot of typing!

[rustisstrikesagain]

Thats excellent work mate. (That pic is now my wallpaper)

[Scifishocks]

Wow!
Amazing pic!

[thedonal]

Bloody nora- it just gets better and better.

Being the cheeky sod I am (critical? Only in a constructive way, I hope), and you're doing the work, so it's up to you 'nall that, but perhaps there would be more smoke about in general, due to the workings of the heat ray?

Can't really say owt though, that scene as it stands is awesome and worthy of much praise.

Yeah- alright, I'll get off my arse and do something myself soon, and find out again how hard it is!!! (previous efforts, cobbled in Bryce 2, entirely from primitives and Bryce's own take on booleans are in evilnerfherder.proboards78.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1170419675&page=4 in general...- not too bad considering)

[GoA]

Heh, thanks mrgrotey, you're welcome. Though i've only been using Max for the past year or so, and i had to teach myself most of it.

Hmm, I have those pics now, I've tried using splines (lathing them), cylinders, never thought of using spere. I made a model of a FM for a college animation project last year, it's not too good, the animation is jerky, and, for time reasons, there is no scene light, so it's pretty dark, i'll give you the link.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QMQ0n82Lco

Also, when i uploaded it to youtube, i noticed i'd made a slight error in the credits, so i'm just redoing the model, it's going slowly though, I had to scrap my first few attempts.

Also, would it be possible to see the texture map for the tripod? Like the one for the soldier and cannon? that'll give me an idea of how to properly unwrap mine (when i finnally finish it.)

I'm on MSN quite a lot too.

[David Faltskog]

Classic Artwork far too good for us mere mortals!

D.F.

[nervouspete]

Love the lighting work there, works well with the sky! And the composition is great too, you've got to feel for those red coats! (Shouldn't they be early kharkis though? What's the Wells line on this? Post Boer?)

My only gripe is that I still vaguely dislike the Wayne/Michael Trimm tripod design, but your rendition of it is superb! My only quibble is that perhaps the people need a little shadow and light play on them.

[Commandingtripod]

Looks great from what I can see.

Nice work once again.

[mrgrotey]

rusti: wow really? wait for a decent one pleease! hehe, thanks mate, its weird to think of my stuff as someone elses background

nerfy: cheers! im not loving it yet but its still very 'in progress'

the donal: thats what im hoping for yeah the smoke and dust will come last as that will be pretty fiddly i think. I like the pic! Boolean commands in max are an absolute nightmare and everyone steers well clear of them unfurtunately. They completely mess things up, really wish they'd sort them out because theyre such a great tool in other programs, but we (the max users) have to model everything by hand in that repects

GoA: past year or so? same here probably about a year and a half now. And im self taught too! Snap! cool animation, little jerky as you say but nothing that you wont learn how to improve with time, just keep at it oh just seen you asked for the tripod texture for unwrapping tips, well my tripod is using 3 separate maps, one for the body, one for the legs and one for the other bits & bobs i.e. sensors and heat ray, plus the feet are on that one too, here are the unwrapped views, (the actual textures are split up into various different mix maps so cant really show that without doing a render to texture which is a pain in the aris .

body:(this is a little messy due to the complicated shape it is)



legs: (all three legs use the same texture, there for only one leg is shown)



bits&bobs and feet:



hope that helps matey.


david: lol thanks mate

nervous pete: the lighting will change coz i thnk its crap at the moment but thanks anyway i created a thead before doing this to decide what i should use and it ended up that although the uniforms probably werent historically correct, they looked better
you dont like the jeff wayne style?!?! you die and yeah there was an error isn the soldier shadow casting in that pick, it will be fixed have no fear

CT: cheers mate



here's a little photoshop composite image i just knocked up after pretty much completing the background.

Ive added the foresty bit on the horizon and made brand new houses for the top of the hill. the forest fire is purely google photo overlay and the chimney smoke is a photoshop quicky

oh and the lighting for this seection has been improved too, you can see the church better adn it generally a bit more dramatic'ish

You can know see the graveyard properly as this is purely the background layer, shame it gets mostly covered up in the main pic, ah well.

Just thought you might like it, sorry the image isnt great quality but it was made of test renders and I didnt take loads of time on it.

[nervouspete]

Mr Grotey said: "you dont like the jeff wayne style?!?! you die"

Heh, I'm surprised I don't hear that more often here. Yeah, I never found them that menacing. Mind you, I think they come closest to "Aieee!" in your stuff. And I like the creepiness of the second picture, always something chilling about being a distant observer of tripod activity - I thought. Shame they didn't have such art for the loading screens in the PC War of the Worlds game.

[GoA]

Heh, thanks MG, though i'm curious as to what unwrapping method you used for which bits, and i'm not too familiar with render to texture, haven't used it much, any good?

Right at this minute, i'm trying to make a Handling Machine (using the pics in that link you posted last time), that should be fun to animate when it's done :rolleyes:

I'm also trying to make the Martian command center as seen in the game, but i'm having a nightmare unwrapping the damn thing, any hints? I have the central 'tower' done (using lathed spline) and one of the four section things done. If it would be easier to discuss over MSN, i'm on quite a lot.

[Stu]

rustisstrikesagain said:

Thats excellent work mate. (That pic is now my wallpaper)

DITTO

[Stu]

I know i'm gonna get shouted at, but.......is there going to be a Handling Machine in the future?

[steann]

FANBLOODYTASTIC most excellent work

[GoA]

stuullaa said:

I know i'm gonna get shouted at, but.......is there going to be a Handling Machine in the future?

Funny you should mention that, i'm in the middle of making one.

When it's done, i'll send it to mrgrotey, (if that's ok with you MG)