Original opening post:
Hey, Folks, here is something I’ve been working on during the last days. It’s another submarine ship, and it is meant to be the ship of the female character of my ongoing animation project. I call it a sea falcon.
I spent most of the time to get a nice edge flow. The material is a stand in at the moment. I plan to texture it and the hull will become more details in the next steps. The cockpit interior is also missing at the moment.
I started to sculpt details of the hull with custom alpha brushes. I have to do this in chunks because I have to crank the multiresolution up to 9 to get this fine details. My machine can’t handle the whole ship with such a high multiresolution. So I separated the wings and sculpted on them. Because I render the ship with a subsurf modifier of 2 I baked the difference from 9 to 2 in Blender Internal. Baking was done from multires and the normal map was retouched in Gimp because there were some unwanted uneven areas after baking.
Started working on the cockpit interior. Please regard the hull’s material still as a better clay render … lots of reflections but good to show the finer details …
I haven’t managed to do much today, but here is a little video that my machine rendered last night. It’s nothing special and quite raw stuff. It just shows some more perspectives.
And I worked on another texture. I’m not sure about this. I think it’s better than the pure metal look. But as I said, I’m not sure.
Edit:
I forgot to answer your question, Harleynut. I used sculpt brush textures for this creases because modelling this fine details would have increased the poly count extremely. During the sculpting I had to use a multiresolution modifier which was set to 9. That’s massive. Instead of modelling I baked a normal map from the sculpted parts and that works without increasing the vertex count.
Well it’s a big change color wise from the original. I guess it really comes down to what you are trying to portray in the bigger scope of the project. You have definitely grunged it up nicely.
I would probably go with a more metalic and less “rusty” texture. To support the design, which is brilliant so far ( the texture seems to take a little from that impression ). Really good stuff yet … keep it up
Well, Harleynut, my idea is something like this. At some point in the story this will play a certain role. I plan to add a gripper arm and a bay. That does make it really a falcon - catching its prey on the fly For the same reason I painted the additional geometry at the wings. They shall play with the impression of feathers.
Oh, and please do a loud laughter at my ragged painting. I’m not good at that - but I have the feeling that I should practice it to become a better artist. It took the whole evening to paint this parts onto my last render. In the same time I would definitely have modelled the complete thing. But perhaps this turns into the opposite and with more practice I’m able to sketch things faster than I model them. Who knows … Big problem for me is that I can’t turn the drawing area. When do a pencil sketch on paper I rotate the sheet all the times.
If someone knows a good tutorial on this I’m all ears
So from this sketch you see that besides a fast ship this is also a utility vehicle. That was leading me to the yellow and grunged texture. The formidable power loader, wega has made, had some influence but on my original mood board there also was this fine piece of art done by Greg Desantis:
Great art and great design studies which I found on the net.
Thanks, sumoLondo I think that I exaggerated the rusty style. And most of the people, that I asked today wish the metal material back. So I’ll have to find a balance between the stylish metal-look and a somewhat worn out appearance.
OK…so does the Sea Falcon also fly? … or is it just boat / sub? I never heard that expression “mood board” but I guess it gives you inspiration when modeling and designing.
Thank you, Harleynut, my Hannibal was the best I did so far with Blender
Today I modelled the falcon’s claw. Sketching was faster, astonishingly, but modelling is way better The falcon is designed to “fly” at a fast speed under water. And it will make good use of its claws … It isn’t completely ready by now. Some details are still missing and I have to fix some errors. But I think it is already presentable.
Yes, they are allready rigged, but after the first render I felt, that the fingers of the claw were too small. So I enlarged them and now I have to adjust the rig.
Today I spent some time to create another material. So how about this.
Both renders use the same car paint like material. But in the second render I cranked up the strenght of the HDRI for testing reasons. Backdrop is also a stand in.
Here are the nodes of the material with lots of glossy shaders and the normal map for the crevices.
Thank you, Harleynut. At the moment I’m working on the canopy. I’m not really happy with its geometry. And it has to be framed so that it can be opened. Otherwise there would be no way into that ship. Finishing the cockpit’s interior, the bay and mounting the gripper arm is also on the list.