Advanced Hard Surface Modeling Assignment – Prepping

As the first few weeks have passed of our first 3D modeling course at the university, our teacher saw that some of the students already knew the basics. So, she was kind enough to create a more advanced assignment for a select few.

This assignment consists of modeling an ingame vehicle based on existing concept art. (Seen above) and also chose a game where this vehicle could be from and try to make our models fit that theme. 

I chose to model the “Mech” and after going over a few futuristic games, I chose Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare as the game to go by. This assignment has some set guidelines (like a set polycount of 15,000 and texture size) but how we create the model is up to us. So I started to do some drawings on top of the concept to get an understanding of the topology. This is something I have never tried and after I started to experiment in Maya, I realized what I have missed.

To draw and plan the topology is probably something I will always do when modeling from a concept from now on! It gives you a really quick understanding on how you can start the model. Even if you don’t follow it step by step, it really helps you get over that first bump where you try to figure out how to start the modeling. 

CoD: Advanced Warfare has not come out yet, but there is still a lot of images online showcasing the aesthetics of the game. I collected some that I thought could be relevant + some interesting images of “mechs” by a simple google search. The top of the concept of the Mech looks a lot like the top part of an M1 Abrams tank so I threw in some images and blueprints/turn-arounds of those as well. 

The texture of the the newer iterations of the Call of Duty series share a bleak and grimy aesthetic, while the texture for the Mech concept is something that could have been taken from a tank in a battlefield in Iraq. 

The new Call of Duty is a game that will be taken place in a more urban area (e.g New York). This means that I’ll have to look at textures that would fit urban combat. A lot of gray and cold colors matched with a metallic feeling. Above are some textures I found over at cgtextures.com. In this moodboard, there is a couple of airplane panels (for the main body of the Mech), scratched metals (to show combat) and some warning stickers and signs. These are probably something that wouldn’t fit the camouflage of the original texture. But I have this notion that this Mech could be used by the police for crowd control as well. It would probably be needed to have these signs of warning thanks to some U.S regulation. 

Valdemar, another student who is also creating the mech, told me about the Kuratas mechs which gave me this idea. 

We do not need to animate the model, but I have also done some research on quadruped robots and how they move. This gave me an idea of how to create the legs, which is making me the most worried. I’ll need to do even more research on that before I start with the lower part of the model. 

The weeks to come I will be blogging about this assignment and talk about the problems and techniques I come across while creating this mech.