Concept Art

[Askis]

A screenshot wouldn't do any good, just imagine the purple part vanishing, as soon as it's converted, while still being selected, although not a single vertice exists 
Makes no sense I know, I simply rebuild the very same thing today and lo and behold... It works >_>
Max is just weird sometimes...

Booleans always screw up meshes from what I've seen, unless they're simple primitives...
Still, the glitches are usually pretty easy to find if you know they're there.

[Ghiest]

Just don't use boolean modelling, well for anything of detail anyway

For mechs I usually do hard surface sub-d models, to give the nice smooth look, but it's extremely large learning curve for me right now.  But I do have some expert help

[Askis]

Problem is, for most of the joints I have to cut stuff out, as the parts need to fit into each other perfectly, modelling it without using Booleans and still being able to put the figure together in the end is a bit beyond me to be honest^^'

But good news everyone, it seems like I can make it alot more detailed than I initially thought, and if anyone's really interested and willing to pay for a (somewhat overpriced, I'll admit ;P ) action-figure of an Uziel later, printing a few more is alright^^

[(TLL) Heretic]

Ok, I'll bite:

What's a "hard surface sub-d model" ?

(Probably just showing my ignorance, but I've never heard that term before.)

[Ghiest]

Hard surface or reffered to as Sub-d (subdivision) is the practice of making hard surface looking models by sub dividing the model so none of the edges are ever truely 'sharp'.  Most modelling packages have the ability to smooth surfaces (sub dividing and averaging the vertices) giving a smoother look.

- Non-Smooth edges, in real life you rarely ever get very sharp hard edges like this so to trick people into thinking there are smother edges on things they are smoothed



After the smoothing on the model is done then the low poly is created to fit just inside of the hi-poly smoothed model and then the normal maps are baked to the low poly via the high poly to give the illusion of the smooth edges still.



As you can see the original shape still exists but the normal map is deflecting the light to give the illusion the surface is smoother than it really is.  This is how games give a nice smooth look and not the blockey sharp edges (just see games like Deus ex ect

Problem is, for most of the joints I have to cut stuff out, as the parts need to fit into each other perfectly, modelling it without using Booleans and still being able to put the figure together in the end is a bit beyond me to be honest^^'

Should really never ever "cut stuff out" if you ever plan to see it in a game engine as it can freak your engines out quite quickly, game engines are based on Triangles so boolean really take up a massive amount of tris to achieve the same 'smoothness'.  Sure if you are doing CAD or some engineering based stuff it's fine (and most times preferred by most as far as I hear it) but for game modelling most just don't use it.  So you can turn something that was 13k tris (smoothed) into 4 tris and still keep the smooth lines, this is how they bake a 3.5 million tris character in Crysis to 12-13k tris and still keep the amazing detail

[Askis]

Should really never ever "cut stuff out" if you ever plan to see it in a game engine as it can freak your engines out quite quickly, game engines are based on Triangles so boolean really take up a massive amount of tris to achieve the same 'smoothness'.

I don't want it in a game engine, I want to print it with a 3D printer, where I actually need to use as many polys as possible.
If I wanted to print a smooth sphere, the best thing to do would be to use Turbosmooth with 5 Iterations, which bumps up the polycount from 960 for a simple 32 segment sphere up to 1015808.
So I actually need the massive amounts of tris to get a smooth print...

Oh yeah, some work on the leg, not too sure about the back side, not sure about a lot of things, I still have a long way to go

[(TLL) Heretic]

Ahhh, yes, I understand it now, thanks Ghiest

[TheANIMAL]

Uuuuuurrrghghg, real life is such a drag. 17 hour day to day if i include driving time and band practice.

I've made virtually no time for modeling.

[miniboss]

If you like Lego and Battletech, check out Brick Commander.
Theres a guy and a few friends who, afaik, use a CAD plugin to design and build Mechs from Lego bricks.
I find this idea very f***ing awesome and I wish I had some of those at home...
You can find MW4 Mechs for example here.

If this has been posted before I apologize, but I cba to read through 24 pages of stuff before. 

[chrisman01]

Dude, how sick would it be to pilot this while someone NARC'd?

http://www.brickcommander.com/MWDA-Longbow.htm

I count 36 tubes per barrel, meaning a 72 LRM barrage    And I thought LRM 20s were devastating 

Thanks for that brickcommander link, miniboss!  I think I found it once and forgot about it.

I wonder if I still have LEGO Creator buried around here somewhere... It's a basic modeling program, and you can do some pretty slick stuff in it...

[TheANIMAL]

I decided to carry on with this a couple of days ago. 

[Cujo]

a clean model, but I think you're missing out on real opportunities to really add some nice clean detail, like to the missile racks.  I'm not sure what it is, but it seems underwhelming to me in general, the colors might not help, maybe I'm getting the feeling that it's too clean a model, I almost want to use the word sterile.  don't get me wrong, you've got some great groundwork done on this model, but I think there's room for you to expand your artwork a bit, let your creative mind loose on it.

[TheANIMAL]

Thanks Cujo.

Yeah sinse its a WIP i haven't started to give it style and flare. More personality will come from the scene, lighting and textures as and when i get round to doing them.

CLean and clinical look is good for showing off polygons but not much else.

[Askis]

Like the model alot, although something looks off to me...
Hmm... The Legs are quite long compared to the upper body and the cockpit, I think, maybe scale up the Torso somewhat...

[Cujo]

I'd wait till the arms are added to really get an idea of leg length