i love your work  

 

Thanks, Jess - I love your work, too!  

 

looks great, can't wait to see it with color

 

Pretty ironic that colour pix have just appeared, and I've got about as much chance of seeing them as a chicken has of outflying an F-15...  

EDIT: Well, looks like supersonic bantams are alive and flapping - colour tests coming soon!  

 

Nice work on the head so far. The face looks too much like it was extruded from a cylinder. Eyes, nose, and mouth seem correct in terms of size. Is this to just be a straight up reproduction of the toy or do you plan making this an animation model?

 

Guilty as charged, SC - it looked to me from the original proto pix that his face was just that, a flattened half-cylinder with extrusions. Although actually building it out of the overall head mesh was more fiddly than I first anticipated... 

And as for your second point - both.  

Every piece is fully articulated with locked-off pivots, so although the model itself will be a reproduction of the toy, it'll be ready for animation.  

 

Wow, that looks fantastic so far. 
I can't wait to see how it looks as the work progresses.
Thanks for sharing!

 

Beautiful modelling d00d.  

 

Crisp modeling as usual Sledgehammer! Looking forward to colors soon.

 

Many thanks again, all! And cheers, Draven - means a lot!  

Not had much time, but found enough to do a couple of small 'mold changes' and add a splash of colour:

​

Roll on getting 5 minutes to actually continue modelling...  

 

Wow! That's excellent  

 

Awesome. You've got some great skills.

 

Lookin good!

 

Simply awesome. Especially the colors. Really nice and the texture is nice and smooth. All the tiny details really stand out as well.  

 

hey Sledgehammer, it's looking really awesome. Care to share any wire renders? I'd love to tak a look at your topology. Also, are you using polys, or sub Ds? Any booleans? There seems to be a lot of indents and grooves in Astrotrain. Or was it a lot of inwards extrusions?

 

I'll try to get some wires up before too long, SC...been tied up putting stuff together for our latest game (and when this particular publisher asks for something, you don't say no...   )

It's all primitives and poly modelling - I use a lot of spline 'markers' to predetermine where the vertices are going to end up. Bit of a slow, labour-intensive process, but it gives me the results I'm after. And I rarely use booleans as such, as they always seem to give me no end of mesh problems; ShapeMerge, on the other hand, is a function I couldn't live without.  

As for the grooves and indents, yeah, there's a fair number of plain old extruding, but there has been (and will be) a ton of it being done by hand. Needless to say, there's probably a dozen ways of doing it all more efficiently, but truth of the matter is, I'm danged if I know what they are!  

More to come...eventually!  

 

haha incomplete classic astrotrain

 

Booleans get a lot of bad press they don't deserve, to be honest. I swear by them (and I don't mean in a bad sense); if you've seen my work, you've seen a LOT of boolean work. I usually make panel lines by making a stencil and stencil cutting the pattern onto the object, then bevelling inwards.
One of the keys to clean booleans is planar polys (all points laying in the same plane). If you bend a square piece of paer in half, you get 2 triangles, right? 3D apps don't make that distinction; they still see it as the poly it is. Non-planar polys often don't render correctly, and they play merry hell with booleans.
What 3D app are you using, BTW?

 

Keep up the good work!

 

MAX 7, Draven; funnily enough, it sounds to me like what you do is the LW equivalent of a ShapeMerge, kind of. Not that I'm 100% on that assertion, because I wouldn't know LW's control structure from a kick in the pants.  

But yeah, in my experience 'merry hell' would be quite the understatement...