3DAck ack ack, ACK ACK!!!

Mustang13Camaro68

Modeling the Mars Attacks! flying saucer to take a break from my seaQuest project & job hunting.
I intend to model the landing legs & ramp, and also make the non-legged flying version with the ray gun sticking out.
The cuts in the hull are too wide, going to fix that. It might be a little vertically squashed too, gotta keep looking at my reference.
This is just a temp matcap texture. Probably going to put it in Unreal for rendering, to work on my skills there.

scifieric

Lovely! And I ALSO love the title! It made me laugh out loud.

dcomprime

Oh, I love that movie..and great so far.
Will you do an interior of the ship and landing gears?

StarCruiser

Do NOT attempt to reconcile the interior and exterior - repeat - DO NOT...

That is all...

SCE2Aux

Ack Ack Ack ACKACK!
I absolutely loved that movie, especially the opening credits sequence. Are you going to put the saucer in a fleet when you're finished with the model?

Mustang13Camaro68

dcomprime wrote: »

Oh, I love that movie..and great so far.
Will you do an interior of the ship and landing gears?

I'm going to do the landing gear, but not the interior. This is just an exterior modeling and texturing exercise.

StarCruiser wrote: »

Do NOT attempt to reconcile the interior and exterior - repeat - DO NOT...

That is all...

Agreed. I'm not doing that. The movie didn't even have CGI interiors, they just used the sets they were going to use for stop motion aliens before they switched to CGI aliens.

SCE2Aux wrote: »

Ack Ack Ack ACKACK!
I absolutely loved that movie, especially the opening credits sequence. Are you going to put the saucer in a fleet when you're finished with the model?

Maybe. I had that thought. I too love the opening sequence and the theme song. Excellent work by Danny Elfman.

Mustang13Camaro68

Update. Now with the legs modeled. Need to UV them though.

rojren

Nice. I both hate and enjoy that movie.
Given any thought to building any other of the great scifi saucers?

Mustang13Camaro68

rojren wrote: »

Nice. I both hate and enjoy that movie.
Given any thought to building any other of the great scifi saucers?

Wasn't planning on any other saucers. Though, the fighter ships from Independence Day or the saucer from John Carpenter's The Thing could be fun. Hmmm.

Mustang13Camaro68

Update #2 - Added the ramp and the iris doors on the bottom.

BolianAdmiral

This is wonderful.

dcomprime

Very cool

Mustang13Camaro68

BolianAdmiral wrote: »

This is wonderful.

dcomprime wrote: »

Very cool

Thankyou!

japetus

ACK!! ACK ACK!!!
That means..I love it! Great movie!

"I'll be callin yooouuuUUUUUUUuuuUUuuuuUUUUUuuUUuuuuuuuu..."

rojren

****SPLATT!****

.

Mustang13Camaro68

Well. 2 unsuccessful attempts at making the iris doors functional. I COULD just leave it as a static mesh, but the 3d Generalist in me says that it must be able to properly animate too. One has to think of the other artists' needs in the CGI pipeline...

1. Modeling pie-shaped pieces with ONE rotation point results in a hole with "star arms". Not correct.


2. Modeling a true "mechanical iris" based on this website (https://iris-calculator.com) DOES give me the correct hole shape, but the way each arm moves, shows the rounded edge of each arm AND doesn't let me have a dome-shaped iris without bad geometry intersections. The iris doors of the saucers in Mars Attacks! don't appear to be perfectly flat, so my iris doors shouldn't be either.


3. I think I'll need to model some sort of mix between both. Stay tuned.

Mustang13Camaro68

I think I figured out the Iris Doors and have basic UV's for everything. Time for materials!

Mustang13Camaro68

Imported into Unreal Engine 5. Basic materials to start. Trying to rough in the general lighting.
Geometry import on the legs is really bad for some reason. Dunno if its Unreal or Blender's interpretation of FBX...
Also have to figure out if Unreal can do IK so I can rig the legs to unfold for landing.

Here's a still from the movie to compare:

dcomprime

damn bro, you are a lot better at texturing than me...very impressive.

scifieric

Superb!

Mustang13Camaro68

More lighting/texturing updates. Seems a lot closer to the reference.
Next step is to figure out how to IK rig the legs and animate them coming out as the saucer lands.

SCE2Aux

This is looking real good - it'd be great to see those legs animated. Hopefully you can get to the bottom of the leg geometry issue as well. When I see garbled polys on merging models into max, my first thing to try is to reset the Xforms. I believe blender has a similar function as well? Are there a lot of modifiers applied the the mesh as well? That's given me problems before in Max, although again, Blender might be different.

Mustang13Camaro68

SCE2Aux wrote: »

When I see garbled polys on merging models into max, my first thing to try is to reset the Xforms. I believe blender has a similar function as well? Are there a lot of modifiers applied the the mesh as well? That's given me problems before in Max, although again, Blender might be different.

I think you might be on to something. There were a couple of modifiers on the Blender model that I didn't collapse before exporting.

Mustang13Camaro68

IK Leg Test.

Mustang13Camaro68

Death Ray Test

SCE2Aux

Looks good, but I'm wondering if the ripples/undulations in the ray should travel down the beam a touch faster?