Metal Gear Rex

In an effort to really get my teeth into some hard surface stuff, I’ve once again returned to my old favourite, the Metal Gear series.

This time I’ve decided to go big or go home. I’ll be doing Rexy baby herself in all her glory. Kind of. I have a ton of reference shots and very few are the same. That plays to my advantage in that I can be somewhat loose with all of the details and pick and choose a bit of what I like.

This is all really to teach myself the HopsCutter/Machin3 workflow. While I’m not really sure if I could get this thing down to low enough res for a real time, I’ll certainly be trying to keep it as low res as possible. Each section will be (hopefully) better than the last.

This is where I discovered the world of DecalMachines panelling tools. Pure bliss from here on out :grin:


I will try and dip in and out of this project a few times a week if possible. Obviously I want to take it to its conclusion, and perhaps even rig it and do a small animation, but let’s go one step at a time!!

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I started on his rear junk today.

I’m finally getting to grips with BoxCutter, although I think I had better download the new version before I miss out on any new updates and learn old practices. Still, it’s getting easier with every section.

I’ve a few more physical cuts that I want to do before I fill this out with Decals for the rest of the paneling and fittings. Maybe @masterxeon1001 could tell me as to how to approach the cuts I need to do.

If you look at the “knees”, you will see that there are slots there that hinge open on an edge. Right is closed, left is open. There are some of these types of cuts on the top section also. Should I just make the shape separately to get the right depth and what not, and then just use Hops to slice it out?

So, today’s renders.

Edit: I managed to have the time to add in a few more bits and bobs to the back. Nearly time for Decalmachine to work it’s magic.


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I managed to get a bit of time to squeeze in a few more details.

I have to say, I absolutely love, love, love @MACHIN3’s panel decaling tools. So bloody nice, even if I still can’t use them totally correctly.

I’ll move on to the “spine/neck” part next I think. I’ll come back to the radar dome and rail gun at a later stage I think. This baby needs some legs to go with that booty!

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Started the mid section and the “neck” pieces. I’ll definitely redo the back neck piece as I tried to do some fancy boolean crap and then a clean up and it didn’t exactly turn out as planned. I followed the Nitrox video 6 for the cuts, but, well, I didn’t quite make it :sweat_smile:

I also have to figure out how the neck pieces are connect to the top pieces so I can rig it. There isn’t a whole lot of movement, just a bit of back and forth and maybe some slight rotation, but I’ll have to see how many axis I want to do the rotation. Maybe I’ll have to play through MGS1 to get to the battle to see how he moves :fist_right:

I still think the back part is lacking some overall features. Maybe I’ll just fire in a ton more paneling at some point.

Anyway, feedback is always welcome.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how it resembles a certain star ship from a particular angle.

Finally had some time after a week to come back and add a few more details to this.

I built his “penis” gun, added a connection to the head (I had been mulling over how to do that for a while as I wanted it to be as real as possible. In the end it wouldn’t be feasible in real life, but it’s something I can rig and limit the movement as to whats in the game.), made some piston stuff for the neck, and, in general, just tweaked a few things.

I think that overall I could do with more paneling and some more screw and bolt fittings here and there, but I’ll probably just move on to the legs next as I’m excited as it’s taking shape.

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Started on the legs.

I actually had the bulk of the leg done last week and only came here to post a small update, but I guess I had better show off all of the thigh now.

Two weeks of actual real work. Ugh. That meant I couldn’t work on little Rex here for a bit. I had some nice Boxcutter fun on the leg shield parts, and I even managed some suddiv modelling on the tiny flap things between the legs and main body.

Small additions, but nice ones.

I just noticed I forgot to mirror the bottom of the leg across. Too late for tonight. Blender is already closed.



Leg day! Grrr!

The main part of the legs are done. I just have to finish the back part of them and then I can move them into the proper position. I might have to fix the scaling a little bit, but I don’t think they’re too far off. I don’t think the decal works on the underside, so I may have to model something, or try and model a more detailed decal myself.

I also tweaked the head part. I noticed that my “nose” was too square after looking at some more reference. That was a pain to fix and isn’t perfect, but it works okay now and I’m much happier with it.

I also messed with the material and added some edgewear just for some fun.

Back of the legs done, plus some “pistons” inside the legs for when they slide open. Thinned the legs a bit too, just to help with the overall feel and scale of it.

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Tidied her up a bit, moved the legs into position, slimmed her a tad more, and started on the radar dome.

Wow, nearly 6 weeks since I was near this file. That made me sad :frowning:

Anyway, onwards! Another few small details, and more stuff on the dome. Now that I’ve opened it again hopefully I won’t stop until it’s done.

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Keep going !

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Oh, I have big plans for this baby :sweat_smile:

So, I would say that my model is done. Now I need to really be careful as to how I proceed next. Depending on the responses I might go back and add more @MACHIN3 decals, as right now I’m not too sure of the workflow to get this to Substance Painter and back.

I saw this video by @masterxeon1001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN_rlO5ruHg&t=305s

In it, he uses the Triangulate in order to remove the Ngons. Do I need to do that if unwrap, duplicate, apply the modifiers to it, and them bake from High to Low?

Isn’t it more “standard” or “typical” to do what I mentioned above? Use Cycles to bake the bevels to the low poly model and then export the model and bring the Normal map that I created in Blender into Substance so I can add more stuff on top?

Also, if I use the “typical” method, do I unwrap the main model before duplicating it and applying the modifiers so that both of them have the same UV map?

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EDIT: {

I opened the Painter file today and I saw that I didn’t have my base layer turned on when I exported. No wonder I was struggling to get it to look as nice as it did in Substance :man_facepalming:

Lesson learnt. The next post will hopefully not be as error strewn. I mean, I guess that’s what happens when you are rendering at 2am after a few nice whiskeys :smiley: I’ll leave the post up regardless. It’s all a learning experience.

}

Weeeeeeee!

Finally was able to get back at this. I fought hard with baking the decals out. They didn’t quite work out as planned, so at the very least I used them as guides in Painter and used the hard surface line thingy in there to go over them.

I’m still not exactly happy with the material setup (only the top part done for now) as I’m getting anti-aliasing all over the place. I exported as 8K and down scaled to 4. This may also be something to do with the high to low bake. I really don’t think that’s working correctly. I ended up still rendering with all of the modifiers turned on and it looks much better. Since the model was textured using the low res baked, maybe there’s some sort of conflict going on there. I just don’t know with my limited experience.

I also am not very good at texturing, lol.

Whilst the UV’s are pretty solid, there are still quite a of them that are messed up. I might go back and just do a small 1K map for those parts. They’re not major bits, but just for cleanliness sake.

I may have gone overboard with my nuts and bolts :sweat_smile:

Any suggestions are welcome.

The first 2 were done before I pushed the normals up to 2.

Okay, at least now I had all of the layers turned on before exporting!

I managed to fix some of the UV problems without having to resort to making another map. UVPackmaster2 is an amazing tool. That together with ZUVTools have helped a noob like me to no end.

Looking at this I think I need to turn down the bump on the main metal. I was going for a tank turret kind of feel, but I think it’s a tiny bit too much. I’ll also pull back the scorch marks on the top turrets and also the main dirt paint. Then I would say that this bit is done.

I did two renders of each shot, one with just the HDRI to get a feel for the original kind of Metal Gear look, and then one with my funky lights in it because, well, why not?

Critiques and feedback are most welcome.

Texturing finished.

I’m still thinking that I should turn down the bump a smidge more, but the wide shots need it I think.

Anyway, now it’s time to rig and see what I can do with it animation-wise. I think she has to be stored in a large warehouse and perhaps break out of it :smiley:

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She’s up and running. Spent the last week or so learning (see: pulling my hair out!) some basic rigging techniques. A huge, huge, thanks goes to @Ruff for giving me some solid advice and a blend file with some amazing rigging setups. This is just a quick test of the rig.

I now need to fix some of the textures that I broke during the rigging process and then it’s off to learn some animation techniques. I need to figure out the Floor constraint, how to create a walk cycle and use it without the model floating across the floor, and some other tricks for animating.

Links to decent tutorials are welcome.

I maybe want to get her to walk up a hill before firing off a few rockets. That’s the endgame :smiley: D

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