Is the black material on the throat supposed to ha a 45 degree angle?
Yes and No. It’s because the weaving that I used for the texture is a ‘3 over 1’ and it gives you that diagonal line effect. It would have looked a lot better but blender’s anisotropic Shader only works along the mesh’s U (I think, it may be the V) and doesn’t have any controls to adjust this. So I had to assign one shader with an Tangent and the other one with out and gave them both a Color ramp to brake things up… I don’t think that made a lick of sense but anyway that what happened there.
I really like the detail you are putting into your model. What ar some of the methods you are using to create some of the more detailed areas like the chest, helmet, and armature areas. I would really enjoy knowing how you got all of that done.
First off thanks! as for my methods I just use simple vertex pushing and sub-Div (in other words… I move things around until the mesh-smooth looks right) My mean weapon of chose is just working with a very simple model until I’m happy with the overall shape and then I start cutting edges’ into it to give it more details, sharper edges. Remember the closer the egdes the tighter the curve will be. Take a look at the two pic’s I attached. The cube has really soft edges at the top then it has a sharp edge at the bottom. this is because of the closeness of the two edges on either side of the corner edge. This method gives you control over the highlights of your edges (look at my models thighs where the Red band meets the Blue) A sharper Edge gives you a smaller highlight. This with work in every programs I’ve ever use except Zbrush/mudbox because they’re for cheaters!
Is that what you where asking about? I’m pretty old school when it comes to this stuff I stay away from sculpting tools.
Yes. all the peaces of the armor are in seperate pieces right now. I’m hoping to fix that before log, thing like the breast and sternum armor bits should all be one piece as well as the backpack. Each piece of the armor was biult (or seperated) from each part because when I started this I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the suit something that opened up or not and how much detial was going to go into that… but now I’m just looking at getting it rigged and set up in a simple scene nothing to fancy.
I put some light bars above the model to see how the reflection would look so thats why where I got the funky white lines. I’m trying to fix this…
I added some more detail on the hip and added some blue lights just to give it a more ‘power on’ kind of look. I’ll do some close up renders today to show you…
The materials are excellent. It looks like real metal. I like the red or the black grip thing on the hip. Either one will look cool. By the way, what render engine are you using. You might want to try Luxrender.
thanks L.A. I’m just using the basic blender render for now when I get her all rigged I’ll start exploring all the different free renders to see which one I like. Is luxrender faster then the basic blender render because it looks good but it takes forever!?
luxrender takes REALLY forever. Blender’s kind of slow on raytracing, right now, but one GSOC project is to replace its acceleration system with a totally new one, there have been some huge speed-ups.
Anyway, there are all kinds of ways to speed up blender’s renderer. It really depends on what kind of look you want, but it might be pretty easy to SERIOUSLY shear down the render time to the point where animation would be plausible.
EDIT: Without sacrificing much quality.
EDIT: Also if you used blender internal you would be able to use composite nodes and render-layers, which would make things even better (and possibly faster). Seriously, I’d be happy to help you get the most out of the Internal Renderer that I can. It’s really pretty flexible when you get the hang of it.
Yes, Luxrender is really slow. I forgot you planned on doing animation. But one still render wouldn’t hurt, would it? Luxrender works progressively. It updates the screen every few seconds, so you can tell how it’s going to look in only a short time. But it will take forever to get rid of all the stray dots in the shadows and reflections.
okay not much of an update but I’m freak’en stuc on rigging. Its never been my strong suit but I could usly get though it but I can’t seem to get any where with blenders system everytime I think something going to work it blows up and I have to start over or it just doesn’t work. uuuuggghh! Can anyone sent me to a rigging site that just goes though it step my step because the wiki is crap on this matter (at least for me!)… anyway
HELP PLEASE!!!
but I rebuilt the gauntlet wedsday… what do you think?
So after I received some encouragement from a few people to get back and start working on this I think I need ask for some help…
I’ve got the spine rigged and I’ve almost got a working arm rig… almost… but I have a few problems I can’t seem to get past.
The first is that I can’t figure out how to rig the armature so that the upper arm armor piece and the lower half’s passions are controlled from a IK Constraint but the rotation of the upper arm stays with the rest of the shoulder joint and uses its own pivot to rotate and it needs all happen from a bone and not an empty because I need to use it to control the soft bits between the armor on the shoulder… god that’s a lot… the first image should show what I mean…
the other thing is one the elbow. There is a piece that needs to stay rotated rationally to both the upper arm and the lower arm about half way between them, and once again it needs to be done with a bone so that I can control soft bits in between the armor…
Please help, I just can’t figure this out. I feel really stupid I know how to make this work in 3ds max but I can’t figure it out in Blender.
The elbow one is pretty simple, just create a new bone and give it copy rotation constraint on the forearm bone set at 0.5.
The upper arm is also pretty easy, create a new bone with an IK constraint (or track-to?) to a bone at the elbow joint which ‘will filter out’ the y-axis rotations of the lower arm and then use it as your deform bone on the upper arm bits.
There’s a trick from the Mancandy FAQ that shows how to get all the bones aligned properly – well worth watching and easy enough to find online so I’ll leave that as an exercise…
I just wanted to say that this render of Priss’ harsuit is amazing. I am blown away by its acuracy.
Which is a reason i would like to ask you if you would be willing to work on a colaboration of sorts. I will PM you the details but i will leave this link here as it shows what people are working on over at the 405th forum:
Glad to see you working on this again, it’s definitely worth it. I’ll always use your ‘lightbar’ trick, thanks for the tip. I only wish I could help you on your rigging problem. Keep it up, this model deserves to ‘live’.
i love the attention to detail the model has 
