BA8 Digital Diorama - Tank Update

Since my last post, I have been mostly concentrating on finishing my tank model. The last couple of components have needed cleaning up, eliminating unneeded faces, verts and edges. The tank model is broken down into two parts; the hull, and the turret and sponson weapons. I’ve decided I will make two separate 2048 textures for each part, as to have only one for the whole model would be too low resolution. I have moved onto the texturing also, following a similar approach as I did with my RPG-7 model. This said, I feel very uncomfortable with texturing, the whole exercise being an experiment, one that is made worse by the pressure of this being my final piece no less!  At first, I took a UV snapshot from Maya, then brought it into Photoshop. I filled in all the parts of the model with flat colour to begin with, which took a long time in itself, due to the sheer size of the model.  I then collected relevant looking textures from the net to overlay onto my blocks of colour, to add noise and realism. Once this was done, I began to add mud and grime to the tracks and lower parts of the hull. In addition, I added chipping to the paintwork on the tank. This process took up a far greater amount of time than I previously thought it would. As such, I have had to take drastic measures in reducing the scale of my scene to something more manageable.  I would have liked to have completed what I originally set out to accomplish, but I am simply not that experienced at this whole process, and underestimated the length of time it took to work on my texturing. If I could repeat this project, I would no doubt allot more time to the texturing, over the modeling.  

A new thing I have tried out this project, is adding ambient occlusion to my model’s textures. I found out how to add AO to models in Maya with a surface shader, and then went onto find out how to bake this into an image that can be added to the texture in Photoshop as an overlay. Ambient occlusion adds realistic soft shadows to parts of the model, and its texture. I did this for both parts of my tank.

As a result of all this change, I now have a Leman Russ Battle Tank, mounted on a scenic base. The tank’s position in the scene has shifted so that it has become the central focal point. I have it surrounded by rubble, tank traps and barbed wire. I have got the textures for my other objects, but they need finishing. My next step is to use CrazyBump to generate the normal maps for my models. I did manage to do this on one of my models in a project during second year, but have since not touched on the process.

The NUA Incident - 'RPG-7'

My course has requested that all students participate in the NUA Incident’, which is a short game that will be available to play at the exhibition. For us students, it involves submitting one asset, with a 512 colour texture and a poly budget of no more than 500 tri’s. It is quite a simple task, one that should be achievable by students from all year groups, and from people who’s strengths lie in 2D work, like digital painting.

I personally relish the challenge, as I love creating models in Maya. I chose quite a complex object; the ubiquitous, Soviet made RPG-7. The name ‘RPG’ is quite often incorrectly referred to as a ‘rocket-propelled grenade’, however, this is a western-born acronym, and is inaccurate.  ‘RPG’ really stands for: Ручной Противотанковый Гранатомёт  Ruchnoy Protivotankovyy Granatomyot, Hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher.  Entering service with the Red Army in 1961, the RPG-7 has since made appearances in many Hollywood movies and Triple A video game titles.

I started by looking for good quality orthographic drawings of the RPG, searching for blueprints and schematics. Ideally I would need; left, right, top, bottom, front and back views of the launcher to get the most accurate model. However, I was only able to gather a decent-quality side view. In addition, I did collect lots and lots of photographs of the RPG-7; close-ups of its different components, people holding and firing the weapon, shots of it from many different angles etc. I even found images of its ‘in-game’ model from recent games like Call of Duty and Battlefield.   

A sample of reference images I collected for my model

This is the side-view image I used in creation of the asset

After I had the correct reference, I looked at the RPG-7 and decided what polygon primitive it matched with in basic shape. I chose an elongated cylinder, as I thought the RPG is essentially just that: a tube. Keeping in mind my budget of 500 tri’s, I manipulated the cylinder into the outline of my side-view reference image, adding edge loops and moving vertices. After some back-and-forth with poly count against attention to detail, I came up with a model I was satisfied with.  It was fairly testing to create a model with such a low poly count, but I had never done something like this, and it was quite exciting, and good experience as well. Then came the stage of unwrapping my model’s UV’s. I tried to use up as much of the space in my allotted texture square as possible.  I kept all the pieces of my model’s UV’s the same size as to avoid stretching.  I found it was a case of breaking down the different parts of the model and grouping them together in the UV space, and keeping any ‘seems’ in places, which would be hard to see.  Once I had laid out the UV’s as best as I could, I began my diffuse map with basic blocks of flat colour. E.g. green for the warhead, brown for the wooden heat shield, a dark grey for the metal etc. I am not very confident when it comes to texturing, as it is something, which is still new to me. Nevertheless, I pressed on and gathered a few textures from the Internet. I added them to my Photoshop texture file as overlays, so to add realistic detail to the flat colour of my texture. The final stage of this asset was to add some fine details and ‘weathering’ to the texture. I added some light chipping to the metal areas, and created text and other small embellishments such as rivets and screws to appropriate areas.

I got a great feeling of accomplishment once I had submitted the model and texture to the server.