[Discontinued] KNight's Unit Design Thread

Yeah that's exactly what I mean, the model needs to fit the rig exactly. You can't just move around the joints in PA like you could with SupCom, not unless you are going to redo all the associated animations and such.

Mike

What I mean to say is, I didn't move the bones on the rig at all; if you look at one of the pictures you can see an example of this: The mesh's arms are to wide for the rig yet the rig can move it perfectly fine without needing to widen the bones for the shoulders on the rig.

As an Example:


(Also sorry, I know you frown upon people posting their own works in your thread.)

Edit: Actually, I know understand what the problem is... I may need to alter the mesh afterall, a quick fix, making the shoulders less broad.

Edit2: Actually I figured out it was just a problem with the rig, I accidentally connected the arm to the imperial_Alpha_mesh bone as well. Whoops.

Just some messing around with the Vanguard, It felt kinda "aimless";



And honestly still kinda does, might need to scrap it and figure something new out from the ground up.

Mike

long range directfire tank hunter ... so basicly a heavyer version of a GIL-E ? but that´s all what i could think off ... otherswise one could say it´s a reskin of a sheller or a lesser version ? ... ... ... shame it being scraped :/

last thing i could think of is turning the turret into a burst gatling simlar to the uef t3 pd from supcom ...

Well the idea was that it was very defensive, tough and longer ranged but slow to the point that you wouldn't really see it "out in the field" because it'd be easily flanked. This was before the Uber Vanguard got into PA.

Mike

type/rolewise i dont see an issue honestly it would merely requier a name change ... the uber vanguard is as we know
a meat shield close range high damage unit .... yours could still keep its defensive long range capabilities but simply be not too tough ... i mean it doesn´t look heavy but rather like wanting to punch holes into something ... so
me thinks if you were to turn it into a more positional style tank you may broaden its base more more giving it a apperance of being slow(er) and give it a longer/bigger/both(?) barrel ... or just give it a general bigger size then the current moddel (yea .. i´m in brainstorming mode) how big did you want it to be compared to the lever and/or sheller?

Just something I'm working on, wanting to do a Lightning/Tesla gun type thing but kinda getting stumped on the design bit which is kinda important! xD

Mike

Neat! Reminds me of a tick or a louse.
Do you and the BO Team still plan on adding all these to PA when it's opened up for modding?

Hawk's been pretty busy with life stuff and Ex has been somewhat MIA working on other projects so not sure how much of the BO team will be around and really whether or not these things get into PA hinges on a lot more than just being able to do so.

Mike

If the rest of your original team aren't about, there's plenty of talented Realmies who could easily lend a hand, I'm sure!

Did some tweaking and the first pass on the weapon that I actually mostly like;



Lightning Guns are awkward to design....

Also looking at it right now I'm thinking maybe it's just too bulky overall and the weapon too small? I dunno? This one might end up being a dud like the Vanguard.

Mike

If you made the gun a bit bigger It would work better I think.

If you were going to make it a tesla/lightning gun bot why not scrap the "gun" and put a coil around the bot? Perhaps at the same height of the body and wrapping all the way around for a 360 degree targeting area. Or maybe it can only fire in a 270 degree arc and the coil terminates at the rear of the bot? The way it would work in my mind's eye (I say "mind's eye" because I cannot draw this for you) is that this bot crawls into range of the enemy and doesnt need to turn a turret or anything, the coil charges up and lightning arcs out to its target, perhaps having a small AOE or a chain effect. The coil, as it charged up would have a lighting effect similar to the powerplant's flickering light as energy bleeds off into the atmosphere.

Just an idea

**** yeah, lightning guns!

I think the size is fine, actually, but it would work better if it was offset forwards and above the main body, like so
(side view)


I always imagine lightning guns to be kinda fragile and experimental things, and this sort of poise feels like the unit is nervously holding it at arms length to convey that.

that sounds alot like the Tesla-coil defense in C&C red alert 3 but on leg's

Hey guys, so it's been a bit but I've had a lot going on, and still a lot more to come but I wanted to carve out some time for 3D stuff, I've always had a hard time being "consistent" with stuff like this so it's something I want to work on, but for now a few other things.

For those of you that have been following my Custom Commander Thread in the Backer's Lounge will already know that I've handed my files over to Uber so it's just a waiting game but I never really did get around to sharing it on this side of the forums so I figured now is as good of a time as any!

Keep in mind this does not represent the final mesh or textures, especially the textures, it's entirely possible the guys at Uber might make changes to make sure things fit in and all that jazz and this should only really be considered a concept, very in-depth maybe but a concept non-the less.

So first lets focus on the Mesh with some GIFs;


Basic Wireframe + Shaded View


Ambient Occlusion Render

Pretty Snazzy overall right? I had to really push the frame to it's limits in a few different ways to get the really "stocky" feel to it and while it's not quite as far as long as I'd like I think it turned out really well given the Constraints I had to work under. The Legs gave me a lot of trouble and if you go through my thread in the Backer's Lounge you'll get a feel for how frustrating it was! xD

All in all I have 3 areas that really stand out for me. The Head, Spine and Shields. The Head, well what can I say, I'm, a big fan of my Basilisk after all! xD The Spine just ended up fitting in really well, I think it's a huge step up from what the Delta/Invictus has and hopefully it can get the Necron styled glow(but red instead of green) I want but we'll see what Uber thinks of it, I still think it'll look great but the Glow would really push it over the top IMO. Lastly the Shields right from the beginning I wanted something that felt substantial enough to take a hit or two without being overtly bulky. I figured doing the front cutout and cutting off the corners and giving the top and bottom a slight bend was a good start and finished it off with the bar/rollcage type thing towards the back. Even managed to design the shoulders to be very similar to tie everything together better.

But of course coming up with a mesh was the easy part, I've always been pretty good at that, especially if I had a good concept in my head, but Textures? That stuff is like magic to me! xD I did what I could and after a lot of trying different things and experimenting I ended up with this which I sent to Uber;




Solid colors representation really, nothing fancy like Uber can easily do because I knew that anything I did would barely be good enough to serve as a guide if that so I focused more on getting the right colors in the right places and having the right color ratios and such and I know Uber will come up with something really rocking for it!

So now it's just a waiting game for Uber to have a slot open up when I'm next in line and see what happens.

Until then I have a bit of a pet project I had been considering for awhile. My idea was to Revamp/Update the Pre-Visualization Commander as seen in the Original Kickstarter Video to PA's current style because it has come quite a ways from almost 2 years ago now!

Now, originally I had thought of doing a pretty basic update, nothing too fancy, but then I had an idea, I figured since it was kinda the "trailblazer" for all the commanders to come and maybe try to go for a bit of a "Pathfinder" theme which lead me to the idea of kind making it sorta "bare bones", kinda in the same way a dune buggy looks.

Now that's a bit of a bigger departure than I had set out to do but, if it's one thing I've learned is that when you get inspired by something there isn't any reason to not give it a chance if you can, and with 3D it's easy to re-use or adapt things later on anyways! So I ended up with this after some basic blocking out;



Still very much a WIP but you can start to see some of the areas I want to use the DuneBuggy type construction in, the Shields already have a bit of a Rollcage feel to them and I want to try and leave the Hips, lower spine and shoulders pretty open in the end. I might try to open up the torso a bit as well but I want to give the shoulders a second pass before I try that and work more on the lower spine and hips. Legs I'm still a little unsure on but I think for now I'm going to focus a bit more on the upper half of the commander to nail down the basic style a bit more before I go back to the legs, just as long as I don't leave them alone for as long as I did on my Custom Commander! xD

Well, that's all I've got for now, hopefully I might get some more time to work on this "Pathfinder Commander" this weekend, if not it won't be until sometime this week but I do have a pretty full plate this weekend of things I need to do so we'll see.

Mike

Talking with some of the other RCBM folks and talking about some Naval stuff reminded my about this old thing;



A Revamped Headgehog!

Mike

Lots of tweaking, more substantial stuff done for the shoulders, head and waist. It's starting to come along but I'm not too sure about these shoulders, might try something thats a bit closer to the Pre-Viz design.

Mike

So as you might have read over here, I now have easy access to a consumer grade 3D Printer, and while I know it's not at the level of quality I would like......buuuuuuut........I didn't have to pay for it either so I ain't gonna look this gift horse in the mouth as it were and this gives me a good chance to gain some experience and mess around for basically just the cost of the filament!

So naturally I have a lot of things I could print, but as per my advice to anyone else in this sort of thing, never start off with what you want to do! I always recommend small silly projects to get a feel for whatever it is you're doing because be can be spirit-crushing to try and do something that is way beyond your skill level and failing over and over again.

Of course, even with that in mind I do have a bit of a hand up in that I am somewhat familiar with the whole process, already have the basic 3D skills I need and have a good understanding on the "mechanics" of 3D printing both from research specifically on 3D print but also 3D milling(I've thought about getting into Injection Molding instead of 3D printing) so I figured I could start off with something a touch more complicated and so I chose the Ant!

Now, when it comes to me designing stuff, I pay a lot of attention to what could be considered "insignificant" details, to the point that in most of my LEGO builds I push Articulation and details as much as humanly possible, with some pretty stellar results I might add! ;p So naturally I couldn't just be happy with an Ant Statue! Oh No, it needs play features! To that end I modified the model to allow for the Turret to spin left/right and for the Barrel to Pitch Up/Down as well! So I mucked about with the 3D model and ended up with this;



Pretty basic additions but a good trial to see how it works! So earlier today I got it into the MakerWare software and spent some time learning about that and eventually settled on doing a low quality print(first attempt and all) and scaled it so that the hull would be just under 6cm(3-1/4") long and just under 5cm(2") wide. Unfortunately I kinda derped on the Support settings(not that it would have mattered as I'll explain in a bit) so all the overhangs didn't get any support and the bottom layers all drooped, this was especially apparent on the bottom of the hull in between the tracks. Luckily despite that it still came out like 85% okay and with the help of a knife and a small file I managed to make it it fit together! In the end it took just under an hour to print and ended up looking something like this;



Something else I noticed thought is that the Peg on the top of the hull that the turret slides on to ended up kinda deformed, I'm almost certain that this is because it didn't get a chance to set/cooldown before more hot plastic was put on top of it because it was the highest thing and it just slammed out it's layers super quick.

So all in all good first attempt, learned some things and saw areas for improvement so to follow up I did some testing with calibration cubes and was ready to give it a second attempt. Now remember just shortly before how I said that even if I had enabled the Support option for the first print it wouldn't have really mattered? Well that's because for some reason even with the support option enabled the program didn't place any supports for that big flat area on the bottom of the hull between the tracks. So now this wsa kinda frustrating, but internet at hand I learned about custom profiles and after some quick Json editing I had it printing out supports everywhere I needed it!

So right now as I type this very sentence the Printing is squirting out a second Ant(64% done) and Iit seems the support bits are doing their job because I haven't seen any drooping yet.....not that I've been watching it almost obscesively......riiiiiight......brb.

ANYWAYS, so yeah just waiting on it to print, so far everything is looking pretty good but I'm still worried about the peg, nothing I can really do about it right now, going forward if it still proves troublesome I'll probably end up doing it as a 4th part instead and just gluing it into one part after the fact.

So while we wait for the print(67%), maybe we can talk about what's to come? Obviously I have a lot of models here that could be printed.....buuuuuut the catch is that I almost want to wait of a lot of them until I can get them into the game in some fashion because I do expect that I'll be making lots of little tweaks as it settles into a proper role instead of my "Ideal Version" so there is that. The Big obvious one is clearly my Custom Commander, the catch being I don't think this printer will do it the justice I'd want it to, or it'll require a LOT of post printing work to get it to where I'd want it to be. Of course, using this printer as a testbed of sorts for potentially getting it professionally printed is certainly an options and I won't like, I would LOVE to have a 6-9" Statue/Model of my Custom Commander so it's a distinctly large possibility. There is also the rather large backlog of BlackOps units I've made over the years, sure some weren't that great and others would face the same issues as printing my Custom Commander would, but it's an option. I'm not really at the stage of acting upon specific suggestions and the like but feel free to throw them out there, some might be well suited to doing more trials down the line.

Still waiting on the Second Ant(77%) so I'm gonna eat some ice cram, brb.

All right it's finally done!



Much better in terms of drooping, the supports did thier job but there was a few areas that weren't supported that did end up drooping a bit, nothing as drastic as last time, but man the raft is giving me the hardest time to get off and the supports as well thought not as bad, all in all decent for the size I figure but still not quite there yet.

More research is required!

Mike

sort of a railing or frame commander?

bit of a bummer to be honest, liked the old one better, why the change? poly´s?