Ah64 Apache Helicopter

[teknix]

Hey,
Well, heres my first real maya job an ah64 apache . Luckily i found a lot of reference pictures. Were going to use this helicopter for a short movie. Wich will aproximately be ready in about six months. Its a two man project and im in charge of the whole 3d pipeline .. got lots of work to do ! Well here you go. Feel free to give some constructive criticism. oh yeah, and btw, its gona get moooore detail
\TekniX

if youre interested its about 5XX objects ( or more ) by now, and if you want to help me give me some tips for texturing, ive posted in the maya shading forum ! Thx !

[joojaa]

Project the texture. Anyway you could actually put some decent antialiasing on your renders. I mean if you bother to render them at all and they are stills (because its not so much longer time in render).

[teknix]

Youre right yes the antialising sucked a bit heres a newer one with special guest -> AA 16

Btw, it took quiiiite long to render .
\TekniX

[joojaa]

QUOTE(TekniX @ 12/02/07, 04:30 PM) [snapback]277400[/snapback]
Btw, it took quiiiite long to render .

Yes but as long as its a still it don't matter, your computer has 12-18 hours of free time to crunch every day (so even if you render would take 12 hours it don't matter much). However once you start doing animations all that changes as suddenly time does count this is why in general any serious freelancer has 2-4 computers to work on. Unless the don't do the rendering themselves.

The computer works relentlessly even without your presence. All you need to do is ask it to produce this that amd so picture when you leave for the night considering the timespan between our talks theres a huge amount of computational time thet you could have leveraged.

Anyway you can always safely drop the occlusion/multi raytracing sample amount when you introduce aa because you are already making more samples. for example if your sampling is -2 0 and a occlusion f say 64 is ok then with 0 2 sampling you get a boost of 4 or 16 times so a sample of somewhere around 16 produces on average as good or better sample. Because each pixel may be sampled up o 16 times making your sample amount be 16*16=16-256 samples. Whereas 64 on -2 0 is between on a average 8 samples per pixel to 64 samples.

[teknix]

hehe, i wish he had ... Ive been working all day on it, and i only have one computer although i would love to have lots, ive got a theory wich goes that wich each computer you get yourself the trouble you get gets multiplied by 4 .. Well anyways, yes youre right, he could render at night and stuff, but for the render of the animations later ill get to use the computer at school. Theyre a little faster on rendering anyways. And yea, i know they work when youre not on em they did that before so i suppose they wont cut that service now !
Erm, im sorry, i cant really keep up with your maths here, im pretty new to maya, and in this case i dont even now if i have ao samples, ive got a physical sun and sky, because it looks nice for the test renders, does that come with Ambient occlusion integrated ? And for the last image i had the aa samples on 2 and 2 . But like i said, im NOT into this rendering stuff yet, the things we did in school didnt need such techniques. But as soon as i get into texturing i will definitely get myself into rendering with Mental Ray. Just now i didnt have the time. What is occlusion f ? what stands the f for ? i now what ambient occlusion is, but occlusion f ? about wich value are you talking ?
Although i didnt get it all, thanks for youre help .
Theres not much happening here in the wip section of the students or is it ?
Regards \TekniX

[joojaa]

Not all people like to post wip on highend as you can get much more wooow nice, cool on sites like cgchannel. On the otherhand you don't gain anything form thatkind of crit.

[teknix]

Well i didnt post that much anywhere until now, but ive got the same apache thread running on vfxtalk.
But although im sometimes bad at taking criticism ( depends on how its formulated ) i think its important to get some feedback you can work from to... So feel free!
\TekniX

[joojaa]

Not much, i can see the nickeling at places but other then that it is ok.

ps: In my experience the amount of computers don't make things more complicated, most 3d apps are already designed for networking and power use so thats handled. Howvere each user does make things slightly more complicated. So having two users on 2 computers is much harder than having 1 user and 1 computer. After all dispatching stuff is as easy sas choosing emnuitems ince youve set it up.

PPS: i don't really see any reason why you could t use your schools computers form at home in the background. unless the policy of your school prevents this which is a bit stupid. I use computers all over the city/and world whan writing th highend daily and does not seem any more tedious than just the one computer.

[teknix]

Hey again !
What is nickeling ? Never heard that term before !

Well in the past i had several computers, and if you have to administrate them all self and update stuff well, then in my opinion the workload gets a lot higher. I think your using those computers remotely right ? Or, you dont have to really administrate them i guess, then of course its nice to have several computers ! And when im rendering something i want to do something in the meantime , so then of course its also nice to have several of em . But well, we can move that discussion to a bar or someplace .

Well i did a uv mapping for the main fuselage of the apache. Since its my first real uv map im quite happy with how it turned out. Heres a smaller version of it. I think that im going to do the actual textures at 4k .

\TekniX

[arrigob]

Not bad at all. Very nice model.

[teknix]

Thanks , it took its time .

Can someone help me with the following problem ?
1 ) How can i easily match the edges of say the left fuselage and bottom, they run together and the uvshells are aligned, but i have to paint exactly the same to like not have a ugly edge there, is there an easy way to fix this ? Like say copy and paste the final piece of the edges ( texture ) to the other place an continue from that ?

2) In this image (http://www.ngb.army.mil/news/archives/2007/07/images/072407-Apache_save-full.jpg) you can clearly see a lot of bolts and plates that have a small space in between, on the fuselage itself, how would you realise this ? Bump or Displacement ? Pros and Cons ? How should i paint the bump for the bolts, should i do a gradient from the center, like with head on light, or should i "light" it from the upside ? Any tips ?

Thanks in advance !

\TekniX

[joojaa]

QUOTE(TekniX @ 12/04/07, 07:24 PM) [snapback]277544[/snapback]
What is nickeling ? Never heard that term before !

Its when i see the faceted aspect of the surface that is not faceted. (whn you work with metal it breaks up this way the precess its called nickeling)

QUOTE
Well in the past i had several computers, and if you have to administrate them all self and update stuff well, then in my opinion the workload gets a lot higher.

Well having been part of a organization that managed some 3000 computers i dont really see the fuss about this in small scale (i mean installing 200 computers takes about a 2 hours during which you don't need to do anything). I mean im running 8 computers at home currently and i dont really see any overhead over just keeping the 1 up to date. This is why command line tools were developed. The extra computers are partial mirrors of the 1.

[teknix]

Sooo after some longer time im back with a little update.
After some heavy unwrapping,projecting and suffering in the uv space portion of our reality i can present some texturing results. Im not quite satisfied with the windows yet, but well, sat with them just half an our or so. Well anyways, heres a render with the textured fuselage and the textured weapons under the wing.

@Jooja: well i dont know, that depends on how good an educated administrator you are. Since im self taught in those things, i can not say of myself that it is that easy. But if you have had an education, or have educated yourself farther than what i have in that regard i am pretty sure that it is really easy, or at least like you say -> not a fuzz.

Regards .
TekniX