Looking for Feedback

[wingednosering]

I don't know how long it's been since the last time I modelled for Warcraft. It's been almost a year I'm guessing, but I'm not entirely sure. Anyways, I decided to get back into the swing of things for Starcraft IIs anticipated arrival and thought it would be fun to try something new.


I'm fair at making units, but I'd never tried a vehicle before. For that matter, I've never tried scratch modelling before.

Can anybody give me some feedback on how I'm doing so far? Pic is attached.

Obviously, it's still in the VERY early stages and I'm kind of designing it as I go.

I also think I should take this opportunity to ask: does Bone_Turret work for units or only buildings?

[Edit]: I'm going to keep uploading the pic as I work, so people can see its various stages.
Pic 1: Concept and rough meshes, with floating parts and no attachments except for first shield

Pic 2: Side windows, detailed turrets and VERY rough wrapping has been done. Working on a white mass was becoming difficult, so I decided to add some colour before working on connecting the wheels and whatnot. Colour helps keep the goal in sight and helps with perspective and gives a hint as to what the final project will look like. Temporarily deemed the 'Scavenger'.

Pic 3: Passengers, turret robots, and a driver have been added. Plus pilot and copilot chairs. Originally, the robots had a much higher poly count and there were seven of them. I cut out nearly half their polies and reduced it to five. Wheels have been raised into place and additional texturing has been done. The Walk animation is done. Animating now. Still unsure what to do with the wheels, because they're really ugly atm.

Pic 4: Struggled for a while with the wheels. It's all good to go now except that the portrait is lame, it still needs a death animation, and I would like to add a Collision Box. My original intention was to give it a 'lock down' mode, but the result is so lousy that I'm not sure I want to bother. I learned a bit doing this, but the model is terrible. Oh well. Any advice feedback for the future?

 

[Forgotten_Warlord]

Looks good whats the poly count?

 

[wingednosering]

462 so far. Working on some of the more minor details at the moment. Two shields have been added in the back passenger windows and all of the energy shields now have texture animations. A frequent complaint I recieve about my work is way too many polies, so I'm really trying to keep them low this time around.

[Edit]: 921 in stage 2. Those turrets and wheels are killer.

Any idea regarding the bone_turret question? Also, can you have more than one bone_turret?

 

[HappyCockroach]

I believe you can have as many bone_turret's as you like, as well as having more than 1 bone_head (Ogre).

EDIT: I just checked and the Ogre has 1 bone named 'bone_head' and the other as 'bone_head01', I don't know if both work. Try naming both bone_turret. If it doesn't work, try setting the second as bone_turret01

 

[Forgotten_Warlord]

wow nice with textures, are the wheels suppose to be like tank treads?

 

[wingednosering]

Yeah. I've done even more texturing since. The wheels I made similar to tank treads just temporarily so they look better than full white. I'm not 100% sure what to do with them yet.

 

[wingednosering]

Encountered a bizarre problem and need some help. As soon as I attached my turrets to Bone_Turret 1 vertex on a turret and one vertex on a robot got fastened to (0, 0, 0). Any way to prevent this?

[Edit]: Ahhh never mind. Turns out Bone_Turret can't have a parent. My bad.

[Edit 2]: Bone_Turret isn't working in-game. The unit still needs a ton of work, but I decided to go in and test the Turret function. It seems to do nothing, I tried as both a unit, an uprroted unit, a rooted unit, and a building. The turrets never moved.

 

[HappyCockroach]

bone_turret only works when the unit is a building (that's what I'm starting to believe)

 

[Ghost765]

bone_turret only works when the unit is a building, which is lame imo. if you want to have individual rotating turrets, your gonna have to make a model for each gunner/turret, and then attach them ingame using a dummy system.