It's a reference shot for the Swordfish II. Spike Spiegel's MONO ship from Cowboy Bebop. I am modeling it for hard surface modeling practice.
That looks more like it. The NF one would probably only stick out it's barrel though, as most tank MGs do. The BE one would be a good model for the chain gun.
just for reference this is a rough idea of the size and positioning i was envisioning. With the strut system we could have the add-on weapons elevate up and down in sync with the barrel, pitching up and down around their own axis.
Have you tried this idea for BE? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/M4_Sherman_hull_machinegun_ball_mount.jpg
Is there infrastructure to already support this kind of thing? I swear this "idea" has been suggesting a billion times in the past. What changed? ... oh and it looks fucking awesome btw.
Perhaps now there's more people to code/model them than before Shitload of work though, but if ever finished it would be incredibly awesome
Yeah, it'd be pretty sick, especially with the models shown here so far. I'm just a little nervous that a rather large-ish amount of modeling has been done and might not be immediately used. I suppose it's a chicken-egg problem, eh?
Just to clear this up, I already had some talks with Beerdude and Angry about this. We actually also want to redesign the vehicles to some extent, which makes it easier for a new system to be implemented. The system I came up with so far is documented here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R4KvtBJNXG2YZ6N75Rsdgs0TvSukXa2Aokbrr-OBN6E/edit?usp=sharing Also varbles: once you start normal map baking, get rid of the hard edges. They tend to fuck up the bake. Edit: Also for better readability of the thread, please stop quoting images. It serves no purpose. Another thing that has happened: I might have one of my buddies join in as a 2D concept artist. He could help us a great deal with designing weapons and vehicles. There are still some things to talk about first, but it is looking good so far.
You mean bevel all the edges right? I'm tempted to leave some of the bevel on the final low poly itself especially for BE weapons because they make the front profile look a bit nicer and I don't know what the standard practice is for something like that. Alternately if you mean just smooth the vertex normals that sounds like a good idea too. I'll try various combinations when I get some more computer time.
I don't mean the bevel. I literally mean the edges that you mark sharp and then apply an edge split modifier. Don't do that for baking normals, or you will get visible seams. Some other programs (like 3DS Max) call those smoothing groups. In my opinion it is a deprecated technique, that isn't really used anymore since we have normal maps. So in the end, you build a high poly model with all the details you want. In that you achieve "hard edges" through vertex density rather than editing the normals. The low poly model should always be completely smooth (ergo have averaged normals and no split edges). This whole thing made quite a lot of my bakes look bad before I figured out what caused it. For more info refer to this post: http://forums.empiresmod.com/showpost.php?p=468256&postcount=1
ah I understand what you're saying now, that's a really integral technique I was overlooking. I'm too used to the workflow of normal maps based mostly on image editors and Crazybump.
If every vehicle is going to have a unique model for each weapon and still look good, won't you have to re-do all the turrets? That way, every vehicle turret would have a premade spot for the weapons, like this: No weapons attached: Greanade launcher attached: Greanade launcher + MG attached:
Pretty similar, but as I already pointed out earlier, we want a system that allows for multiple barrels as well, when there are multiple guns in the corresponding slot. Maybe I should just model a concept of that so people have an idea what I am talking about.
