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.