I am amazed by your skills and your patience I never had such one. You also have nice Youtube channel, very well… very well done.
@Moorean & AlinB & Saif: Thanks mates! Glad I inspire you guys 
Well, after a horribly long time working on this into the night, this is what I managed to come up with…
Sorry I can’t write much at the moment, under time constraints n’ stuff. It’s unwrapped and has full Normal/AO maps right now:
These were rendered in internal for now (easier to setup the maps with internal materials):
And a profile view:
And a turntable which was tough to figure out how to render properly, I ended up using playblast along with GLSL (so this is what it looks like realtime):
(tell me if the picture/link breaks, cause it’s referencing DeviantArt)
up next > Moar sculpting/modeling!
(heh, this is my 100th post yay!)
This is amazing. It would be nice if you could spend a little time on teaching people the basics of sculpting. I’ve never been able to learn it with nearly two years in blender. Again this looks amazing and cant wait to see the finish project.
@Dacoolinus My process for this one has been-> Sculpt a rough concept from a poly-sphere, remesh to get more detail, use dynamic topo whenever. Then once I’m satisfied with the forms I retopo it properly, then add multires and refine the crap out of it. After that I export the hi-res and low-res meshes into xNormal and bake maps. On this particular mesh the maps are mirrored to give me double the resolution to work with. (Makes sense since the final render will only have one side of the face).
As far as just general sculpting goes, there’s tons of resources out there. Check out Gnomon Workshop, 3Dtotal, and eat3D (Mike Jensen’s two series are great). Hardsurface is the most difficult (and most rewarding) to sculpt imo. Hopefully I can get all this put together in the time I have left.
Cool, cool stuff, fusobotic. Amazing sculpt. The turntable view is great. Unwrapping the model and defeating the stretching wasn’t easy, most probably?
Since I had splits down the middle (because it’s mirrored), is wasn’t too hard because the mask opening and the head are separate and there aren’t many extremities (arms and hands are what make things complicated). I did use a technique called UV offsetting which helped hide the fact that it was mirrored whenever I baked the normal and AO maps. I can describe that technique if you’re curious.
Yes, thank you, I am extremely curious :).
(But also tired because of the work on my project. So I’m going afk in a few moments.)
I’ll need to leave in a second too. Here’s an illustration of the head UVs:
Simply move the other half of the UV’s to the right (1 unit exactly) and then export your model for baking. This minimizes the creasing and other nastiness that happens when you try and use a normal map on a mirrored mesh since any UVs outside the bounds are ignored. Hopefully that makes sense…
Thanks for the quick reply … I’ll come back to that … 
but looks like a cool trick
super-tasty model. have you ever seen ‘sucker punch’? There’s one scene that has some re-animated soldiers, that are powered by steam and ‘clock-works’. similar to your concept. yours seems very original though, I am not trying to detract or compare. but it’s a cool movie, you might like it. it’s about some scantily clad women who go around kicking asses, basically. ranging from giant samurai warriors to robots to dragons.
Thanks Modron. Nice to hear from a blender veteran
I have seen Sucker Punch, I loved the ehem- visuals (if you know what I mean), but the story was meh. It’s just one of those movies that is fun to watch but not really enlightening, so to speak. I’m surprised though that no one has made a comparison to Killzone, which isn’t one of my active references, but has a similar visual style to what I’m going for right now.
Pretty wicked looking game, and kinda fun if you ask me 
The model that you’ve created is totally on par with Prometheus quality. You didn’t do yourself any justice by claiming that you might not be able to pull off a concept! I’m glad you didn’t go with someone else’s but made your own instead. It’s creepy, pretty, rhythmic and just the right bio-mechanical mix to be a real eye-catcher.
I know you’re making a still and what you’ve shared so far has been very valuable. I’m curious what in your workflow for modeling and setting objects for texturing would change if this were to be animated? I’m assuming that the mesh is all one currently. Would you do more pieces for more control or is that something I just made up?
Amazing work, nice process/work flow. Thanks for sharing and congrats.
Thanks Hola and ookka!
For animation… I would probably make things modular and not deform anything unless it’s tubing or rubber. Robots have a reputation for being extremely difficult to rig, given things have to function somewhat realistically (or just be a glorious mess of thousands of moving pieces). I don’t even want to know what a Transformer rig looks like. With this head, what I’ll most likely end up doing is using a combination of lattices and shape-keys to adjust it into the right pose. 3D animations of any kind usually require multiple people to handle different aspects of it. Stills are a bit easier for lone wolves like me.
(I wouldn’t be able to do something like this in a lifetime, because it takes a group of thousands to do it in 3-4 years, and then even longer to render out :P):
Here’s a couple things you could check out…
Here’s how one would go about modeling such a thing:
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/540/robot-Design-with-Josh-Nizzi#.UiueHsashcY
Here’s some stuff about general workflow and rigging a cyborg/robot character:
And here’s where I got most of my animating knowledge from:
http://blip.tv/blendergroupie/char-animation-in-blender-part-1-blender-101-1782440
Hope that helps answer your question. I do know how to animate and have done some insane stuff, it’s just one of the most horribly laborious jobs ever. I have the greatest respect for those who are patience enough to do it. The returns just aren’t worth it in my perspective, because you spend several hundred hours on a few seconds of polished animation. That’s why I save any animating for game projects, when I absolutely have to do it.
It’s kind of a shame because the blender community is somewhat- sequestered, from the rest of the CG community, so some of the best education and techniques are entirely unknown to blender artists. I try and integrate things I learn, even from other programs and their tutorials. Blender education is kinda limited and usually isn’t based in the traditional arts (it’s purely technical, which is fine for learning the program, but useless when it comes to art in general). This is why I’m starting to suggest people check out the Gnomon Workshop, ConceptArt, & Polycount, instead of CGcookie, or Blender guru if they really want to improve. True professionals tend towards Autodesk most of the time, so blender is getting neglected in certain areas, education wise. My goal here is mostly to revive and instill more in-depth techniques in this forum so people will start taking Blender more seriously once you guys begin spitting out more mind-blowing and polished works. We’ve got to step it up if we want blender to become a staple within the industry. I might (no promises here) do a making-of video once I’m done, just to give you guys some more tips. Anyways </rant> I need to get back to work here.
Very Nice Work !
Thanks willettfx!
Probably should have been working a bit more while the servers were down, but there’s school so… but yeah, here’s a look at what I’ve got so far. Finished up the jacket model, and am currently working on the helmet:
next > moar modeling, and sculpting details on the triangular-power-tube-thing that's sticking out of his mouth piece. :spin:
I must say thank you!, thanks a lot for sharing this, I’m pretty much a hobbiest with blender but I want to make it part of my daily basis as a modeler or/and concept designer, this post really opened my eyes to a new workflow. Basically my workflow is step 1) open blender, step 2)try to do something cool from the air which 97 percent of the times ended up with frustration, I’m gonna try this workflow, which seems pretty rational. Again thank you for taking some of your time making this. By the way I love where this project is going.
@estuard You’re welcome! I’m glad I inspired you; your feedback keeps me going too 
So here’s what I’ve got for the helmet, I’m still sculpting out the arm piece… it’s so hard to get robotic forearms to look elegant but not overly detailed and still flow right. If any of you have some reference of cool robot arm designs, that would be awesome! This time I bumped it up to 1080 and 1000 render samples (direct lighting, 1 diffuse bounce, so that’s why it’s grainy). Btw, does anyone have suggested sample settings for a finished 3D illustration? It won’t need too many glossy samples, or bounces, but I’m curious if someone has a quicker, minimal setup that still looks not-so-noisy. Thanks!
I don’t know off-hand myself yet, but this may help you to learn how to render faster and with less noise: http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/cycles-non-progressive-integrator/
It’s a $10 lesson, but if you can afford it would be well worth the money if you render much. I’m going to be getting it pretty soon myself (and I’m incredibly cheap!)
You’re making fantastic progress, fusobotic!
I’m glad you’ve posted about those other learning resources, as well. Gnomon Workshop is a terrific resource. Some of the others I’m only barely familiar with, but I’ll check them out again. I agree that it’s important to step outside of the Blender community, as there’s literally an entire world out there that you are missing otherwise!
creepy, love the concept though. as above, nice artwork!