Greetings!

Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.

3DRaw's Roughneck Projects

rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
edited March 2012 in Work in Progress #1
I've been modeling in Blender on and off for over a decade. Almost all my project are based on vehicles and equipment from the TV series "Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles". The current model that I am working on is the Ape Marauder mech suit. As you can see, I'm in the process of texturing it. The top pic is the original model from the show.

ma01.jpg
apemarauder%2012-08-02.jpg
ape%20marauder%2012-20-10%2001.jpg
ape%20marauder%2012-20-10%2002.jpg
ape%20marauder%2012-20-10%2003.jpg
ape%20marauder%2012-20-10%2004.jpg
ape%20marauder%2012-20-10%2005.jpg

Thanks for looking!
94236.jpg
Post edited by rawrecruit on

Posts

  • nlancaternlancater0 Posts: 2Member
    Great model from a horrible movie.

    I have read the book several times and that is not how I picture the ones from the book.

    Keep up the good work on this model.
  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    In my opinion, the Roughneck Chronicles were better than that abomination of a movie. And since you're trying to recreate the series, I don't think we can judge based on descriptions in the book.

    Nice work so far.
  • BerkutBerkut1 Posts: 0Member
    nice work. Personally I would tone down the bump map just a tad, but otherwise :thumb:
  • AardwolfAardwolf171 Posts: 82Member
    nlancater wrote: »
    Great model from a horrible movie.

    From the look of it, this one is based on the 'ape' marauder from the 3d-animated series, not the generic mecha from the 3rd movie.
  • Maverick EagleMaverick Eagle0 Posts: 0Member
    Yeah the 3D animated series took the best parts of the book and the movie its own ideas into well made for the time series. Its actually pretty good, well thought out, and enjoyable to watch. My only gripe is that the series ended at the 2nd to last show in the series. Hey rawrecuit. Since your making making these models. Could you do us a favor.. Grab some friends and Finish the show!!! :D I think it only had one episode left and it would be pretty awsome to see a last episode with up-to-date graphics
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Well, the work on the marauder model and itA’s textures have gone as far as I want to take it for now. Any changes I make to the textures from here on out are going to be subtle, small ones. I managed to get all the textures for this to fit onto two 2048X2048 UV maps. There are things that I am still not happy with. I used a lot of mirroring in the textures to keep the number of uv maps reasonable, and you can see it if you really look. IA’m hoping that when I put the model into some interesting backgrounds and give it some action poses it will be less obvious. I've put far too much time into this thing, and frankly, I'm kind of sick of looking at it:) I'll be glad to start work on something else.

    Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I really appreciate it.

    Maverick Eagle, there were actually four episodes not finished for the series. This fan site has some good descriptions of what we didn't get to see.

    Love this show, especially the designs of the weapons, vehicles and gear. If you haven't seen this show, it's available to stream on Netflix.

    Ape%20Marauder%2012-26-10%2005.jpg
    Ape%20Marauder%2012-26-10%2002.jpg
    Ape%20Marauder%2012-26-10%2003.jpg
    Ape%20Marauder%2012-26-10%2004.jpg
    Ape%20Marauder%2012-26-10%2001.jpg
  • meugen06meugen06334 Posts: 5Member
    I loved the animated series.And this mech is a good representation of the one in the series.
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    After I finished the Marauder I thought I would give building a bug another shot. IA’ve tried building arachnids many times over the years since I started using blender, each time with less than spectacular results. One of my big glaring weak spots is organic modeling. This time I spent a week or so trying to get something good going before I gave up on it. I did learn a lot from the experiment, though, added a bunch more tricks to my repertoire. I managed to get some interesting things going in the model, but nothing close enough to the original to encourage me to keep going. Below is a screenshot of where I stopped.

    arachattempt.jpg

    In the center is a reference pic of the original warrior bug from the TV series (<a href="http://artopia1.com/troopers_commercialwork_02.html">downloaded from here</a>). I canA’t tell if a lot of the detail that I am trying to model is actually a result of textures. It seems like modeling it would require far more polys than they would have likely have used.

    Anyway, I moved on to another project, this time the Skimmer from the TV show. HereA’s a reference pic I downloaded from John McGinley's old website before it went belly up.

    sk16.jpg

    Here's my progress so far:

    skimmer%201-13-11%2001.jpg

    skimmer%201-13-11%2002.jpg

    skimmer%201-13-11%2003.jpg

    The work is going slow. I feel like I spent 98% of the time doing things that I will have to undo and redo. Progress is being made though, and I feel like I can get there from here.
  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    Don't be discouraged by having to go back and redo something. It's a learning experience.

    And the warrior bug looks to me like it's pretty heavily bump mapped.
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Hey, this thing is starting to resemble a Skimmer! Spending gawdawful amounts of time trying to get all those smooth sloping angles right, but itA’s starting to pay off. DonA’t think IA’ll ever be able to get it dead on accurate to the original but I think it will end up being pretty cool.

    SKIMMER%201-19-11%2001.jpg

    SKIMMER%201-19-11%2002.jpg

    SKIMMER%201-19-11%2003.jpg
  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    Unless you have exactly the same software package as the original artists, "close enough" may be the best you can do.
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did the show all in Lightwave, and I'm working in Blender. Thanks for your responses, btw.
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    I made some big leaps forward on the skimmer model. I'm pretty content with what I'm seeing right now.

    skimmer%201-23-11%2001.jpg
    skimmer%201-23-11%2002.jpg
    skimmer%201-23-11%2003.jpg
    skimmer%201-23-11%2004.jpg
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    IA’ve got a lot of work done on the passenger area of the Skimmer lately.

    skimmer%201-31-11%2001.jpg

    skimmer%201-31-11%2002.jpg

    skimmer%201-31-11%2003.jpg
  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    Those seats look awfully close together for CapTroopers in armor!
  • homerpalooza67homerpalooza67228 Posts: 1,891Member
    really nice!
  • lennier1lennier1913 Posts: 1,280Member
    Looks great! Those models really show how the design of many elements was superior to what the movie had shown (except for the standard ships, which were more impressive in the movie version).

    Do you plan on also doing some of the stuff that's only shown in the DVDs' concept sections?
    And where's Albert? Did he finally get a promotion? ;)
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    IA’ve been working on the pilot area of the Skimmer for the last week or so. I donA’t have a lot of reference for it, because there just werenA’t a lot of good views of it in the show. The instrument panel I may eventually replace with a bump map, if I can figure out how to make one good enough.

    skimmer%2002-08-11%2001.jpg

    skimmer%2002-08-11%2002.jpg

    skimmer%2002-08-11%2003.jpg

    skimmer%2002-08-11%2006.jpg
    Walkyrje
    Those seats look awfully close together for CapTroopers in armor!

    Thank you for the critique. I looked my reference material over, and did a little resizing and spaced them a little more, but the layout is pretty close. Here's a view of some troopers sitting in them in the show to give you an idea of their scale.

    skimmer%202-1-11%2004.jpg
    lennier1
    Do you plan on also doing some of the stuff that's only shown in the DVDs' concept sections?
    And where's Albert? Did he finally get a promotion?

    I would love to build some of the variant versions of the vehicles sometime. At the pace I work, though, it may take years to get around to it. I think the next project will be an attempt at building the power suits.

    As for Albert, one of the great mysteries of the series is whether the poor little guy survived the incident on the "Dakota".

    skimmer%202-1-11%2006.jpg

    albert.jpg
  • lennier1lennier1913 Posts: 1,280Member
    Great progress!
    A few tweaks here and there and you can probably generate a normal map for most of that instrument panel.

    Albert is only one of many easter eggs. IIRC to get even with Babylon 5 where they got to blow up Doug Netter (as President Santiago) one of the fallen soldiers in this show also had Ron Thornton's face.
  • JennyJenny2 Posts: 0Member
    Oh, the seats are bigger than I imagined them to be. Thanks for the screen cap!
  • Dr.SleepDr.Sleep0 Posts: 0Member
    Skimmer is one hell of model! :D Keep working man, looks great so far!
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    It's been a long time since I posted anything on here, but I've actually been working on texturing the Skimmer model for several months. I've grown sick of looking at it, so it will have to be called finished, for now anyways.

    Blender recently updated and the new version looks completely foreign to me. So the next project I start work on is going to be slow going as I learn the new interface.

    valleydeathskimmer1-2-12.jpg

    Skimmer%25252012-26-11%25252001.jpg

    Skimmer%25252012-26-11%25252002.jpg

    Skimmer%25252012-26-11%25252003.jpg

    Skimmer%25252012-26-11%25252004.jpg

    Skimmer%25252012-26-11%25252005.jpg

    Skimmer%25252012-26-11%25252006.jpg
  • meugen06meugen06334 Posts: 5Member
    Can you tell me how you applied the decals.I also use Blender.
  • ElowanElowan0 Posts: 0Member
    Dr.Sleep wrote: »
    Skimmer is one hell of model! :D Keep working man, looks great so far!

    Heck yeah!!
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Thank you for the encouragement. It's very much appreciated.
    012, 23:49
    meugen06
    Can you tell me how you applied the decals.I also use Blender.

    The model's pieces are UV unwrapped, then I export the templates and load them into photoshop. From there, you paint the textures over the templates, then put them back into Blender as textures. You will want to look for UV unwrapping tutorials to explain how all that is done.
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Since finishing the Skimmer model, I have secluded myself in a distant, mountaintop monastery and set about learning the ways of Blender 2.6. I hated it with a deep hate at first but as I've worked with it, it's grown on me and I started to understand appreciate most of the changes that have been made since 2.49. I've been downloading and watching hundreds of video tutorials and I've been blown away by how little I knew before and how much Blender is capable of. Anyway, I've taken a stab at organic modeling, one of my weak spots , and was able to make a human head that bore a passing resemblance to the Johnny Rico character from Roughnecks. For the time being, until I find a good tutorial for modeling a male body, I've attached his head to a male base mesh model I downloaded from Blender Cookie. I'm working on building the powersuit now. Here are some pics of my progress. I'll throw some more up as I move along, but updates may be few and far between. I work slow.

    rico%25203-01-12%252003.jpg

    rico%25203-01-12%252001.jpg

    rico%25203-01-12%252002.jpg

    rico%25203-01-12%252004.jpg
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Moving along at my usual leisurely pace. The shoulder pads were looking too puffy, so I've thinned them out some and continued making the pieces down the arm.

    rico%25203-07-12%252001.jpg

    rico%25203-07-12%252002.jpg

    rico%25203-07-12%252003.jpg
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Progress being made. Added more parts to the chest piece, added the belly padding, made a belt and the flaps that hang down over the crotch and the butt.

    Rico%25203-12-12%252003.jpg

    Rico%25203-12-12%252002.jpg

    Rico%25203-12-12%252001.jpg
    94236.jpg
  • TALON_UKTALON_UK2 Posts: 0Member
    Looking really good, nice work there mate.

    Gonna have to hunt this series down, caught the odd episode of it when it originally aired, but never got a chance to really get into it.
  • rawrecruitrawrecruit0 Posts: 0Member
    Looking really good, nice work there mate.

    Thank you for the feedback.

    My Roughneck trooper model moves forward. I made hip pads and pouches and then I've been working on the boots, and they are taking me a while, since my reference for them isn't the greatest. They are still very much a work in progress.

    Rico%25203-21-12%252001.jpg

    Rico%25203-21-12%252002.jpg

    Rico%25203-21-12%252003.jpg

    Rico%25203-21-12%252004.jpg
Sign In or Register to comment.