Eric2575

Nice call, Caroline

That's something you can be proud of Marcos!

Check your frames. Maybe you are rendering a frame before you turned lens flare on. Make sure you are rendering from frame 1 to frame 1 - hopefully frame 1 is the frame that has lens flare turned on.

Have you tried it without any models in the chor, just the ground plane and the bulb light? Try increasing the flares intensity.

Can you tell us why you would use both a normal map and a bump map? I thought a normal map was a step above a bump map?

I'm not on my AM computer, so I can't verify, but I've had the same problem before. It's usually something as mundane as not having the light turned on or similar. Why don't you turn off every other light and see if you even get any light at all. If you do, then start checking all other attributes. Is it a klieg, bulb, sun?

Very professional looking Matt! Great job!

Hi Paul: nice start with a promising story behind it. The key will be to keep your motivation about the project. Set yourself definable goals and reward yourself for work done. Off course interaction with the forum will help you along the way. Looking forward to seeing your progress.

Jason: Ok, I'm in Los Angeles and have a few minutes to spare. I am writing this on my friend's computer, so no AM to check anything with. My AO settings are pretty straight forward. I chose AO in the chor settings with 100% illumination and 100% AO. The only light that is left on is the key light but it's turned down to about 30%. Enable shadows on the keylight with 100% shade and two passes. Now when you put any model in this chor setup, it will look washed out in the shaded mode, to the point of where you may have a hard time seeing any detail, but as soon as you render, it will look fine. It will be easier to position the model if you enable shaded wireframe view. Test the setup with a quick render. I am certainly no expert on this, but I noticed that AO will not give a lot of specular hi-lights, so I turned up specularity pretty high on my model to get it to look right. It's actually still too low, but it's not finished yet. I hope that helps. Start a new post and let us see the results of you AO renders.

I guess I must be getting a little better at modeling since you guys seem to like this tank, or maybe it's just because this is a big machine that can go boom? Just kidding. I really do appreciate everyone stopping by and keeping my enthusiasm up with this project, thank you. Jason, I'll post my lighting settings later on tonight. Right now I am out the door for another trip to LA. It's pretty straight forward, but there are a couple of pointers I can give you. You guys must be getting tired of updates by now, but I did put a little more rust and impact spots on the tank. Still not done, but getting really close. I'll be out of town for about 2 weeks without AM, so this will be the last update until then. When I come back, I will finish the tank and post a 360 flyaround.

Thanks Al. Here is one more render. I need to leave town again, so I don't have a lot of time to grunge it up right now.

Thank you Stian.

I haven't tried rigging the tracks yet, but imagine it would involve a bone for every link? 93 links per side...Well, you gave me food for thought. I haven't had a lot of time lately to spend on texturing, but I do have this update. This is just the basic color and some cammuflage. Still got a lot of dirtying up to do. Stian rigged the tracks for his little robot a couple of years back. I'll do a search and see if I can get some insights from that. Stian, if you read this, did you use a bone for each link?

John, if anything, I'm grateful for Stian to keep encouraging me and everyone else with his fantastic work. Rodney, the barbed wire may look better once I dirty up the tank. It may go in the end, but for now, I'm gonna try and work with it. Noober, thanks for your input on the reflection issues. I haven't tried reflections with soft turned off, but will do so once I get back home. Robcat, you guessed right, no bevels on the major shapes. I did that on purpose in the beginning because I really did not expect this WIP to evolve as it has, and now I may have to go back and bevel them - not a big deal since the major shapes are pretty simple geometry. Once I get done with the texturing, I want the tank to look like it went through hell and back.

As a matter of fact, I did have soft R turned on at that time and have since turned them off. Tell me more about the issue noober. Here is my latest update before heading out of town for the weekend. I will dirty it up when I get back. I'm also not sure about the barbed wire - saw it on a reference pic and it looked pretty wicked, just not sure about how it looks on my model. Well, its a WIP after all.

Thanks for the encouraging comments guys! I just ran into a little problem that has been discussed on the forum before - putting a value into the reflectivity attribute will give you all or nothing. Putting in only 5% will give me 100% reflectivity with no way to tone it down. Does anyone remember what the fix is for that?

Ditto on the congrats Ethan. Job well done.

Well, I'm almost done with the details. Gotta go out of town again this weekend, so prolly no updates till after I get back. I do have this one though. Stian - planning? What's "planning?" This is all off the cuff. But, if you have some advice on texturing, I'm listening Well, I thought I'd start with a base color attribute and decal the rest. Seriously, if you'd share how you did that terriffic texturing job on your Cat, we'd all learn something.

Very nice John. Can you explain how you did that? You used Sweeper in some way?

That looks like a Rooster I don't want to mess with. Nice work Marcos.

Thanks for the comments, they are always appreciated. Robcat, that chord is a steel braided cable used for pulling other vehicles out of any muck they might get into. The tank will have another bigger cable on the top plate for pulling itself out of trouble. Here is another update. As you can see, everything is splines. I know I could have used cookie cut decals for the grilles, but I wanted to see the depth only modeling can provide.

Actually...

A bit more detail added. I really admire people who can speed model.

I'm back at it.

Huh?