Okay, so … I’ve been using Blender for nearly six years now and strangely have never shared anything I’ve done. Never been confident enough until now I guess.
These are two teaser images of a project I’ve been tinkering with for over a year - a detailed, articulated model of RoboCop. One of my favorite movies as a kid, I memorized every line, detail and greeble of the Robo-suit, and now that I’m actually building a virtual model of it I gotta say … some seriously wild topology going on there. The model will be very high poly and do as much of the inserts, greebles, grooves and access ports as possible with actual mesh geometry, resorting to bump maps only when absolutely necessary. The complete planned feature list:
Fully modeled face and head that fits (unlike the movie makeup) under the helmet, neck guard and back plates. I should mention the face mesh was modeled pretty closely on sid350’s face retopo guide found at blendswap. (http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/67858)
Fully modeled and rigged gun holster, plus fully rigged Auto-9 handgun.
Fully rigged body and face, with facial expressions.
Cool easter eggs, which I will now spoil for you - the blinking “alert” box that pops out of his bicep in RoboCop 2, and possibly the arm gun from RoboCop 3
Forgot to mention a planned feature - the Interface Spike will be included. Executing it might be tricky - from checking film clips and reference photos, it looks like the prop was a solid-cast fist with the spring mechanism inside, and the way the knuckles flip open to reveal the spike is actually anatomically impossible: the fingers would have to disconnect from the hand if it really worked that way. So I’m pondering different methods of getting it in there in some rigged fashion, or just doing what the prop guys did and include an extra, specialized right fist with fingers that don’t move, and its own armature.
The chest armor has been a nightmare to get looking just right … it’s deceptive in that it appears to be a single molded piece, and that’s how I tried to model it at first. Not happening. I’m not even gonna tell you how many false starts I made before I finally got it looking satisfactory …:o
Sorry, yes, I should have made that clear - these wires have subsurf enabled and Optimal disabled. This is the mesh minus subsurf:
My workflow is basically: start with a low-res, simple mesh, get it into the basic shape, then apply a level one subsurf, do some more detailing (keeping backups of the low-poly handy in case I make a terrible mess, of course), then apply more modifiers as needed, depending on the necessary resolution. Don’t know if that’s good practice, but that’s what works for me, and that’s where I’m at with the chest armor right now. I’ll probably apply at least one more subsurf to get the rest of the detailing done. Right now the goal is no normal maps at all - every groove and detail will be mesh geometry.
The early, first-stage chest mesh:
Also: I’ve scrapped the hand entirely, as well as the helmet and most of the head (sticking with the face, though). Was going to post some wires of the head and helmet, but I don’t see any need now since it’s basicaly back to square one with those parts. They look presentable but they’re full of bad topology, and I know I can make them a lot better.
