Battlestar Galactica Viper Mark 2

So it's been a few years since I have added to this blog and for good reasons. over the past 4 years my life changed dramatically meeting my now wonderful wife and 13 months ago becoming a very content father to a beautiful girl.

With things finally settling and recently starting a new job I am getting back some free time to motivate myself and get back into modelling. The itch came back when I started my new job 3 weeks ago and the guy I work with happens to have a massive interest in game programming.

 After lots of conversations I offered to build something for him to use whilst he getting to grasp C sharp. He wanted a ship for a side scrolling 2d game and expressed his love of the viper from Battlestar Galactica. I started where I always start and that was on google images for some good reference images

I chose the Viper Mark II as my own preference as the Mark I was a little blocky and boring in my eyes and opinion. With a little bit of frustration in Photoshop I eventually split the reference into workable references for 3ds max 2017

Issues

So yea it's been a while and 3ds max has changed 'for the better' quite a lot. Icons have all changed which freaked me out at first but I soon realised all the keyboard shortcuts were the same and my muscle memory prevailed. Unfortunately My first attempt was pretty bad, I didn't really see this fact until I tried a unwrap modifier and saw how bad the UVs were

Sadly I do not have a screen print of the original unwrap but believe me it was a mess. The Godsend So the Model was salvageable. Taking out many loops that were unnecessary and moving things around helped the start of the salvage

The most helpful was the new features in the unwrap UVW modifier and with lots of patience and effort I manage to get the unwrap nice and packed out ensuring the right components were given a good amount of space.

Next 

 So this is where I am currently at. over this weekend I should hopefully get building a high poly version as I want to create a nice Normal Map for the low poly to give it that detailed crisp look but keep my poly count low currently standing at 638

Continued

As I was building the highpoly version I started thinking that maybe I should create a diffuse texture first on the lowpoly so that when I bake the normals from the highpoly to lowpoly. 

Will Continue this soon.

DiffuseMap

So to kick off the Diffuse map I quickly rendered the UVW template and edited it in Photoshop.  As a check I added some simple paint to double check the UVs and help me identify all the areas of the ship.  Straight away I found some errors in the form of overlapping so as I painted the red stripes the appeared in places I didn't want.

Well Lesson is definitely learned but as I am in a rush to move on to other projects I am simply going to ignore the errors and work around it.

Next I am going to carry on with the diffuse map adding proper textures from some photos and then finish the highpoly model for the normals map

Continued

Carried on with diffuse map and the more work I do on it the more I realise how bad the UV's are but it's a great learning curve.  

Most of the problems arrive on the far left side with lots of overlapping and stretching is occurring as I haven't given the correct size proportions to things such as the wings.  

So I could have just fixed all these problems and hidden the fact but I did want to document it for my own reminder and for anybody out there wanting to model what to avoid.  For now I am going to take a break from this project and start another but will return and update in the near future.