WIP: My First Unit Ever

[NavyDawg]

Well, with the help of a free Poser d/l and UtahJazz's tutorial + Kinboat's paperdoll and props, I'm working on my first unit. It is loosely based on Mad Max and hopefully will be of use to someone (other than myself). If anyone has any comments, I'll try to make adjustments, but I'm still learning. I think there might be too much civ blue right now... Anyways, preview is posted below.

Edit: Oops, wrong forum. Can a moderator please move this?

 

[Bjornlo]

Congratulations, and good luck with this and future units.
You did, however, begin by postin in the wrong forum. This one is for completed units only not WIP.

I'll ping the moderators so they can move it and you can get more useful feedback than this.

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On the unit. Madmax was cool. A unit based on him would be cool.
I would suggest that he not draw his gun until the last minute, in keeping with the character.

Fortify = crouch slightly, move his feet into a better firing position, move his hand to the gun
AttackA = draw and fire (leave weapon drawn)
AttackB = fire and reload (leave weapon drawn) (this animation would be the one that would loop)
Victory = includes that he holster his weapon.

The unit itself...
the boots don't work. They look out of place on him. Suggest he have plain boots without a cuff.
Also, there are some transparencies on his boots.
Rather than a big blue belt, just the brown (changed to blue) on the shouldpads should be enough.
Alternately make his whole short civ colored. But, perhaps a darker shade.
lose the white collar.
Maybe lighten the color of his suit to grey and add a few details to it, including a properly colored belt to hold that holster.

 

[Stormrage]

Et tu, NavyDawg? I like the unit, its cool I might find a use for it somewhere

 

[Plotinus]

Very nice!

Moderator Action: Thread moved.

 

[TopGun]

Cool idea... he could serve as a modern time "western" renegade/partizan/guerilla/insurgent...

 

[Darque]

Its looking good. I can't wait to see the finished product.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

Great unit thus far, only thing I can say is:

TWO MEN ENTER! ONE MAN LEAVES! TWO MEN ENTER! ONE MAN LEAVES!......

I really loved the Mad Max movies (especially Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome)

 

[Storm Grunt]

Lookin good Dawg. I could use this as an early infantry unit for the Brotherhood civ or Legion of Doom civ in the Omega Project if you follow Bjornlo's suggestions.

 

[Quinzy]

maybe put the gun in the other hand? righties are used more in civ units than lefties.

 

[NavyDawg]

Thanks for the nice comments everyone. I'm adjusting the model per Bjorn's suggestions. One thing I'm having trouble with is making a holster. I might be able to do it with a cylinder primitive, but I'm still in the learning stages. Does anyone have a holster prop? Hip mounted or on the back should work.

 

[Bjornlo]

I have several. Or, tell me what you want, and I can model it for you if I haven't already made one for myself. One caveat is that I am a so-so modeler, but not the greatest Poser guy around. So it won't be a smart prop.

Did you like the one I used in the title page I previewed a few days back?
Want something a little more cowboy? A little more urban?

 

[NavyDawg]

Bjorn, based on your Norse Axeman, you are one of the better poser guys around. Thanks for helping. Going off the attached image, a black hip based holster + belt will be great. Doesn't have to be fancy. It does have to be longer than the average pistol holster, as this one is used to hold a shotgun.

Do you use Truespace to model poser props? I really need to learn how to do this myself. Also, I need to get more familiar with the different file formats. I'm unable to get anything in poser right now unless it is a .pp2. If truespace can make poser compliant files, or if I can use Bryce or Daz to convert the files, that might work...

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

As Bjorn stated in his tutorial, Truespace saves only COB files, which Poser cannot use, however, you can import said COB files into Bryce 5, then export them as OBJ or 3DS files, which Poser can import (Poser's native file format, for geometries at least, is OBJ)...

Personally, I use OpenFX to model stuff I don't immediately have available (I made the Buster sword used by my SHinra SOLDIER and Cloud Strife units in Open FX), since OpenFX can export directly to 3DS format, and it's a bit faster to make certain shapes than truespace (for instance, I could easily have made those tugboat horns that Bjorn used in his tutorial by drawing a line in the shape of 1/2 of the horn, then using the Lathe tool to essentially create a mesh by rotating that line 360 degrees).

BTW, there are quite a few poser props, including holsters and guns, available for free at www.daz3d.com www.renderosity.com and www.turbosquid.com

 

[Bjornlo]

I use truespace for the fast stuff. It is just soo simple. It is not a perfect modeler, but given the scale in Civ, I think the two work really well together.
Bryce 5.0 is still free. Bryce can read most common formats including COB. The free version of Truespace only generates COB files. There was a 19.00 upgrade once to a newer version which can save 3ds file.
When I did the Truespace tutorial, I used only the free version. Since I figure the free one is what 90% of the users on here would be interested in.
From a Poser & Bryce perspective Truespace is really handy because it does boolean modeling with primitives and that is the only sort of modeling that is available within Poser or Bryce (although Bryce is far less limited, and with a few tricks can do real meshes too).

Any ways, here you go. 1 elongated holster and the one I used in my "sowhat" wall paper I previewed a few days ago.

Yes you could Hikaro, But how long would it have taken you to create the lines, lathe them and so on? And that would not have covered a fraction of the tugboat which using the simple (but crude) boolean method I did in a single day.
There are plenty of better modeling techniques than the basic ones I showed in that tutorial, but I think that none are faster. And, this is also the easiest method to learn going in. Boolean modeling isn't the only type that Truespace supports, btw.
Ultimately I want to get good enough at Lightwave that I never load Truespace again. But, LW is complex and a litte time consuming... and so I keep going to the simple and fast way.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

In openFX, drawing the line and lathing something only takes about 2 minutes at most... A lot of the aircraft fins and such that I modeled in OpenFX I actually used something even simpler, the draw line and extrude command, which takes less than a minute if you remember to have the horizontal vertexes selected when you build the faces. I may get the free version of Truespace, but since I already have Open FX (which is totally free), which just so happens to use almost identical commands as 3D Studio MAX, so going from one to the other is very easy... I learned how to do the lathe and extrude thing from my brother showing me in 3D Studio Max (my brother is an aspiring Pro 3D graphics artist and is really good with 3D Studio MAX). Also, if you're REALLY ambitious, you can add skeletons to your models and animate and render them in Open FX as well... which is a plus since Open FX requires less than half the system requirements that Bryce or Poser do... The animation setup is a bit complex though, but appearantly once you get used to it (along with the fact that it is possible somehow to apply an animation to a similar unit by merely giving it the previous model's skeleton) the Open FX animator could easily rival POV Ray for rendering/unit production speed, as Muffins, the Open FX master proved on numerous occasions. SInce I have Bryce and Poser, I'll just stick with importing 3DS files generated in Open FX, since I already am familliar with them.

 

[NavyDawg]

Bjorn, thanks for the holster. It looks really cool and should work great for my unit. Thanks also for the advice along with Hikaro about modelling. I do have Bryce, so I guess I can use openFX or Truespace. I'll give them both a try and see which works better for me. I'll post a new preview of the model when I get it updated.

Edit: Updated model is below. This is frame 01 of the default animation rendered in civ scale. The belt and holster are almost impossible to see. Any suggestions? I might have to make them a brighter brown to stand out...

Also, I'm working on the attack animation and have hit a wall. I'm using a gunflash prop made for the paperdoll. How do I only make it visible in a few frames?