It's all in the details....

So just when I had convinced myself that I had indeed competed the SketchUp model a good friend and work colleague appraised it with fresh eyes and painted out that those hydraulics would have cables and hoses connecting them. I knew this, but was taking the easy route and for the sake of an extra hour's modelling, there they are - BOOM! Hydraulic cables. I had come this far, it was foolish not to add such a cool techy detail and they really add the finishing touch!

3D model complete!! Now reaching for the colouring-in pencils....

Not enough hours in the day.... You really have to eat into your sleep time to get a suitable amount of work done to be anyway near productive. Last night I closed the lid on my laptop at 2am, a time that I consider late-ish, but not unusual for me. I tend to hang up the Wacom pen around 1am but the finish line was in sight and I wanted to wrap this stage up, so after many late nights and brief lunch time stints I'm happy to say that recording the modelling stage of the design is finally compete! I think I clocked up over 15 hours of recorded modelling, it'll have to be edited down somewhat and played two, perhaps three times actual speed with my voice over explaining what I'm doing. I feel this then necessitates a brief 20 minute real time modelling technique intro, where I cover the basic of the techniques I use, explaining arrays, components, plugins that I use and how to intersect two forms to create cool and interesting shapes. Now the real fun starts, rendering this out and matting it into a plate and painting into a cinematic frame that breathes life into it - and to do this means more late nights.... good thing I love designing and painting!

Stay tuned!

Winter Camo - Digi, digi and more digi camo.....

So this tutorial is still in the works, have to film the last stages of overall detailing as we're pretty much there from a modelling point of view, but at lunchtime today I had to allow myself the pleasure  (and it is a pleasure) of jumping into Keyshot to see where I want to take this... I had already thought about setting it in some baron, snow covered wilderness, a lonely posting for a Remote Weapon System drone. I checked out some cool winter digi-camo patterns and wrapped them onto the model and inserted a photo backplate, painted out the Jeep that was there and was struck with something that in hindsight is actually very obvious, the camo made the model hard to see against the background!! I managed a bit of a work around by adding gusts of snow to knock back the trees, this gives some visual separation and you can make out the form more...

These are not the final images of the demo but a work in progress teaser and just helping me decide where I'm taking this.

Hope you like them, more coming soon!

New gun mounts - Check!

These have been plaguing me, finding the right balance of cool tech and scale, "remote weapon systems" are great reference and I had ideas about concealed turrets that extend and rotate out, but they just started to over complicate things and look like ears! So whilst I've taken licence on the overall design I'm choosing to play down the guns, just go for that utilitarian look of hard naked tech!

More to come....

Staying late after work...

Just aren't enough hours in the day! I'm cramming them in to try and get this tutorial vid done, I thought it would be a very direct modelling approach but its been interesting as I despite having a design to work to I'm still resolving design issues on the fly, there's trial and error, software crashes and mistakes all recored, I will leave them in as I think its important to see these issues, its about resolving them when you come to them... I do have to pause the recording quite a bit, just like painters do, I have have to just step back and look at it for a while, turn it around, walk away make a coffee and come back, see it with "fresh eyes" hit pause and resume the modelling... Audio is going to have to be recorded after, I just can't talk and create, hats off to those who can! I just enjoy finding "The Zone" and losing myself in it....

Here's a little screen grab from last night

CIWS Sentry Gun

Enjoyed modeling this one, there is something about the heavy industrial construction of the Navy CWIS systems (Close-in weapon system) that made me want to design one of my own, and why have one gun when you can have four! This was modeled in SketchUp, rendered in Keyshot and painted into a scene in Photoshop.

The cool black product shot....

The Navy model

Desert model

Night vision shot

Original SketchUp model