Help on US WW2 Pershing tank..

[CNecron518a]

I am modeling and texturing(my second part to the project) a Pershing tank from WWII as a personal project. Do you guys have or know of any good tutorials or tips for building a tank? I am building the tank from a good reference I found of a front, side and rear view.

[rburke]

I think modeling that is going to be really strait forward. now if you wanted to do animated tracks that is a bit more complicated but could be done with a texture. However i can suggest one tutorial from gnomon that deals with hard surface texturing. Think its called behind the scenes, hard surface texturing. they go through the process of uv layout and then go right into some awesome tips for texturing a military/industrial style attack helicopter. very good stuff to watch. But again that should be a nice easy model to tackle tanks have a lot of flat planes and since they are built of many pieces you can get away with floating geometry. Really get down and do some research on the pershing too, it was a very good design for a tank and there is just a ton of info about them online. People even own them and take them to shows and stuff so im sure someone has pictures of all the parts, and if not there is undoubtedly some tank nut who would supply pictures of one. I would assume the main body of the tank is going to be very little geo and that you will prob be spending most of your poly budget on the turret and the track mechanism, but dont forget all those details too. Tanks are always covered in all sorts of shit, think of it as a gigantic mule that everyone used to carry their equipment. so getting pictures of pershings in the field will help give you an idea of how much stuff they piled onto them.

[matthewparis]

http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/136

Good tut for making tank treads that animate. It's in 3ds max however. May still be of some use..

[CNecron518a]

I am making this tank for a current generation game so what would you guys say would be a decent poly budget? I am thinking at least 60,000-80,000 tris would seem appropriate for a current generation Xbox 360/PS3 style game. Maybe even more, I just am not sure. Any input would help.

[dabu]

no, not 80,000 tris. unless this game is all about being a tank, blowing up other tanks.

use as much geo as you need. nothing more. 10k should be sufficient for the low poly, if it shows up in silouette, model it.

80k for a high res model to cast a normal map from would be ok....

[dabu]

also, most of that geo will end up in the wheels. driving games use about 40 k tris per car model nowadays for ps3 / 360

so it could go up from there, it depends what kind of game this asset is for. COD4 props are probably 15k tris for their tanks...

[CNecron518a]

I appreciate the input on the polys Daniel. Here is my recent progress for the tank. I am going to hopefully finish up the rest by the end of next week. I decided this is going to be a project for hard surface modeling, and then I'm going to do an Alien environment for my personal project.

[rburke]

not sure if its the picture or what but the wheels seem to be oval, prob just the pic though. The front wheel you have a division going down the center that adds nice detail but i feel can be removed. That groove between the front and back side of the wheel can be done with a normal map and texture most likely as that would prob never read in the silhouette since its covered by the tracks.
For the tracks you may try using an extrude along curve, or a duplicate along curve. as it is not its pretty uneven but a track is like a chain and made of identical parts all the way around. i mad ea little markup of areas i thought where problem areas. you got a large budget on this thing try to make the tessellation as even as possible, will really help it read well.

The mesh of the body is going well though and seems to be fitting in nicely. with a large budget youll be able to extrude out the separate armor plate and even give them a small bevel.
cant wait to see how this turns out.

[CNecron518a]

heres the tank done modeling it, I am going to start unwrapping and do the AO pass this week along with base pass texture.

[Hans Schrijvers]

Hey Chris, I see a lot of spaces where you can reduce the polygon count. You have a lot of vertices that don't define shape and those could easily be merged together and the extra polygons you save can be used to add more detail.

The silhouette is reading very well, nice.

[CNecron518a]

Yeah so I tried to fix areas that are just using up tris. Also I deleted half the tank, because the tank is essentially symmetrical so I can just duplicate on the negative axis areas that will be the same. I'm going to start the unwrap and AO. Hows it going Kablamo?