XB2178 - The Rest of the Crew

After creating the tank commander I then went to on to creating the gunner and the driver, however I wasn't entirely pleased with the head of the commander as I felt it wasn't low poly enough and so I managed to cut it back down again. Note how the poly ears are now a double sided plane.

Before

 

After

 

I was very aware of how pressed for time I was however, and so I did feel a little rushed on getting the rest of the crew done quickly and so that they were very similar to each other as I had stated in my Time Plan that I would rig them. So I created one and copied the body over and manipulated it slightly after I had weighted the verts to the biped I had set up for the animations to follow.

I'm not certain yet as to what they'll be doing however I may have them be lost and looking at a map with a compass or something.

Crew Moodboard

For inspiration into my characters I looked at quite a lot of warhammer as what I was aiming to create was essentially a diorama scene someone could've made with 40k models. Additionally I really liked the thought of my commander wearing a double breasted leather jacket or something so I figured there could be some more good ideas to be had. Additionally I did look at some other things such as stylised heads as seen in Paper Man as well as some real world things.

There wasn't a whole lot of things for tank crew however, as they either looked very similar to standard soldiers minus a gun or else they wore very standard BDUs or some kind of light uniform, which really makes sense as it no doubt can get quite warm in the belly of a metal beast.

As a result of this my crew ended up looking quite standard looking as I really was more worried about rigging them and trying to animate them at that point and really I can add more detail in the textures at a later date when I'm not as pressed for time.

Driver and Gunner

And here they are in all their glory, I really will have to make it easier for people to differentiate between the with textures as they do look very similar at the moment with only the very subtly difference of the eyepiece.

They are indeed rigged along with the commander now, hence why I was able to painstakingly pose Driver to a more idle stance.

Commander issuing orders

I had a fair amount of fun posing the commander as a little test run and I feel that it really does help bring him alive, however the actually rigging process was very slow and tedious.

Firstly I dropped a biped rig over my models which resembles a human skeleton, and place it over my crew. As the way 3D models are rigged and animated, is that you create a skeleton or else your own custom bones, and then weight vertices to different bones and by different amounts in percentages. It is then these bones that you move whilst you are animated something. Although I didn't have much luck with weighting the vertices and so I had to bring up the weight table, which shows how each vertex of a model will react to each bone ranging from 1.0 to 0.0, with 1.0 being 100%. So I was very thankful then that I had created a low poly model and didn't have a lot of vertices to go through.

A preview of what I had to go through to weight the skeleton to my crew members.

Below are some comparative shots showing where I positioned their bipeds and how many bones I used.

having them all rigged however is a huge relief as I was quite worried that I would have to spend ages doing it but thankfully I they got rigged in the end.