New Mecha Work In Progress.

Already on with even more crap. I figure I can count on less than a handful of people ever reading this beast. So while I might tempted to pretend to be HBO and lure people in with gratuitous swearing and !VIOLENCE! I think it will be best to keep it tasteful.

Whenever I'm presented with a new subject to work on the first priority is always to try and guesstimate exactly how long it will take to produce that piece in 3D to a certain level of quality. In seven years of professional modeling the only thing I am sure of is that I really can't make good estimates : ). Just making passable work can be taxing, and sometimes making work great takes orders of magnitude more effort to get right. And just to throw some miserable aberration into it all sometimes things just click, the methods pan out and you are in and out and done much quicker than you realize. Sadly the first case is more common and you can't plan around the second, thus the life of a production artist is mostly one of groveling, working extra hours to keep yourself satisfied with outcome and trying not to look too foolish when it is time to show your progress. As such, being worshiped and praised should be low on your priorities if you want to work in games.

Anyways onto the MEAT of this post. Here is the start of my next BIG personal project. It's something near to my heart with roots in the 80's (specifically Macross) and my earliest days of learning Maya on my first 1Ghz Machine. I guess this makes it as good a place as any to start up again and prove the years haven't only made me a drunk with bad art sensibilities. Without further ado a model I will never texture:



Honestly looking back on this is kind of love/hate now. There are some things I like about the stance the disposition of forms and the interplay of shapes and structures. But for as many things as I like with the overall design, there are so many things I would change that were I to try and fix I might as well just start over.

So fast forward to now, it's almost 8 years later and here I am, for the third time I believe, making this model again. An earlier version may be lost to antiquity and this one will never be completed, it peaked early. That said, I still don't think I have done this up right. I am going to heavily refine and reproduce this beast, hopefully into a definitive edition. Here is the state of it after the first few hours of modeling it:



There it is capped out of Maya and not really looking like much at all, yet. Once this puppy get's humming along knocking into a better form should be a rather lively fun task. As I go forth on this I will be working it out in sections while trying to keep the buildup nice and modular. I want this to have a good plausible form, look logical, and have some nice plausible feeling articulation and actuaction. Mostly I want this to congeal into a hot looking shape that will texture easily, zBrush nicely, and look killer. But that will be a long ways out from now.

I am going to be detailing this from the ground up and work out the kinks as I go. I'll be modeling a bit on the front legs tonight. Here is a tease of the more fleshed out designs. It should be interesting to see the deviations later as the actuall finished form is worked out. ANYWAYS, the pics:




An Ortho Drawing of the leg to get the ball rolling...




And some detail of the front hoof/foot in more of dimensional and tonal rendering...

That's it for this post, hopefully I haven't derailed the Titanic yet...

-g'night