Here’s a little something I’ve cooked up in the past couple of nights. I mixed up shapes from normal tanks and howitzers, so I don’t think you’ll find one quite like this in the real world. I still need to add a few details before starting with the texturing and scene around it…
Great model. Now add some textures!
BgDM
That barrel seems a little big. Did you model this after an existing vehicle?
Bloody awesome! 
One question: What happens when a rocket hits the side of the tank? :-? There’s no protection over the wheels/tracks.
Thanks for the answers. ^^
K1lljoy&Wiggie: I used several existing vehicles as a reference. The tracks are a bit stretched version from those of M60 and the cannon I took from your basic big-arse howitzer. I wanted to make it look intimidating, but not as clumsy, as howitzers tend to look like, so I kept the gun big, the general design a bit low and the tower less square than they usually are.
The tracks are a bit unshielded, but I thought showing them off like that looks better than plain armor-plating. Also, the scene that I’m thinking about, has the tank function as an artillery-unit protecting a coast-line - I thought that it’s a good enough excuse to over-look some details. 
Here’s how it looks after I slammed it with a camouflage-texture. I’m not really an expert on these things, so I would appreciate all the comments and suggestions you could spare. Should I change it somehow before proceeding to adding rust and whatnot? It looks a bit featureless for me now…
Hey TJKeranen, great model! Since it’s your own design I can’t comment much…I think you should add an “arm” to hold the gun, know what I mean? Textures are not bad but they seem stretched in some places…are they UV mapped?
PS: kinda reminds me of the German Wespe/Elephant…
Thanks for your comment.
Not sure what kind of an arm you mean… (I tried google, it gave me Transformers with cannon arms…) Some kind of structure attached to the tower to support the cannon while aiming, or something in front to steady the thing on, while moving around?
The textures are not UV-mapped, although that’s probably what I’ll have to do (read: learn to do), unless I want to have a separete texture for all the bits and pieces…
You need to look at a reference picture of the mobile howitzers the army uses today. It’d be under “mobile artillery” I’m pretty sure. I can’t remember the exact name of the weapon but I believe it begins with a “P”. The replacement was going to be the Crusader, but the project was canned by President’s cabinet and congress. The arm he was talking about goes right beneath the barrel of the cannon and if I’m not mistaken its a hydrolic piston that serves to lift the weight of the barrel for firing. I’m not positive on the mechanics of it, but it has NOTHING to do with transformers lol.
Desoto: It was Paladin. I checked a few pictures of it, but couldn’t really make out a lot… Well, I extended the pipe under the cannon a bit to function more as a support, but nothing big; hopefully it’ll do.
Today I fooled around with LSystem for the first time and managed to make my computer crash several times. I did learn to more or less use it, though, so I quickly put together a “draft” of the environment I’m going to make for my tank. The whole thing is getting kinda heavy, having a couple of million faces, but luckily I became aware of the usefulness of several layers a while back, so I guess I’ll manage. More pressing problem for me is UV-mapping, which I just don’t seem to be able to crasp - hopefully the Blender-guide will be out soon…
Here’s where I’m at right now; Next I’m going to turn the sand into dirt and add more trees/grass.
I like the sandbags and the tank tracks on the ground a lot. You did a pretty good job with them. Just make sure you try to get rid of the “seams”.
just one crit from me: the proportions of the body to the weapons makes the whole thing look like a mini tank, and so realism is out of the question.
other then that its awesome 8)
Mystery… the paladin looks very much like that. A “mini tank” with a giant gun sticking out of it.
First of all, great model!
Question, are you going to animate it? If so, do you know of a way to make the track move? I don’t mean just like in the tanktrack tutorial, I mean added to that, the tracks should bounce between where they rest on the wheels. And that where the lower-wheels are moved up by bumps in the ground, the tracks follow, if you can understand what I mean.
And a tip: perhaps you should also add some damage to the armor plating.
it still looks kind of small…maybe its just me
anyhow nice work
Not much time for Blending recently. =/ But I managed to scrape something together today, so here’s the latest image:
halfgaar: No, I don’t think I’ll animate this one. And if I do, I’ll have to re-make the tracks, because as they are now, they are way too heavy to be animeted without too much blood, sweat and tears. The damage on armor and other details I’ll add after I learn UV-mapping, and that’s probably about 15 minutes after the Blender-manual is released.
How’s the grass, by the way? I did it using the card-method. Think it’ll work like that, on the background?
Don’t forget that when you “camoflauge” something you can do it so well that the viewer himself can no longer see it! You can also blur the all-important visual cues that make the (two-dimensional) picture appear to be 3D. You can also make the picture too damm dark!
All of these things are exactly what a camo artist in the real world would want to do, of course. But this is not the real world; it’s a 2D picture.
So brighten it up a little bit, put a few lights in strategic places, and perhaps thin out the camo nets so that Gentle Viewer the feeling that “this tank is camoflauged” without actually obscuring important details from his sight. (Hide all your dirty-laundry but none of the important stuff.)
Also… you’ve put a huge amount of time into creating all those details. But the finished image obscures them completely. With artistry comes the “artistic license” to choose what conveys your desired-effect most effectively. All sorts of details are intentionally twisted away from “reality” in the name of magic.
How’s the grass, by the way? I did it using the card-method. Think it’ll work like that, on the background?
The grass does not yet look real. The density is not high enough, the color is not “ultra-green” like healthy grass and all the blades are pointing in the same direction.
The mudd BTW also needs some work…