Mammoth Tank

Comments
The track and turret can be animation ready.
Other than that, I'm still practicing edgeflow and topology.
The more we do, the better we get.
The Mammoth Tank, Inspired by c&c3.

It was fun!

Process
This is a slightly complicated model(O.K not really).

Techniques

Setting up a proper Ref

Of course, in the above image, I have already resized, cut and altered the image to make it reference-friendly to me when imported into Maya. This set is VERY important. I stress it again, if you even want to use reference images, the images MUST correspond with each other. As you can see above, I used photoshop to align the joints and important areas to take note of when modeling in Maya.

When we are done resizing and altering the image to our hearts content, we can move on to importing the image to Maya. And oh, don't forget that in Maya, you will also have to do your required settings for the alignment and distance for your ref image which was briefly taught in class.

Making use of the Ref

Above:Right View

Above:Front View

It is a good habit to periodically check and manage your vertices for both right and front view. Then switching to perspective to check your model. (Or at least that is what I do.)

After a bit of extruding and inserting edge loops after planning, (Inserting edge loops are not random, it is usually done at places where you want to manipulate the vertices. After playing with it for some time you will naturally get it.) this is the image we get.

Tank Threads

In the above image, the foreground shows a weird shape, this will be the baseline for our tank threads. There are two main ways to derive to this shape - the cv curve tool or manipulating a polygon cube. I used the latter. Inserting edge loops at certain points(and places where I want to extrude to form the depth of the tracks) and moving, scaling the vertices to form this model.

Next, I would want to ....

So how is this done? It is pretty simple actually. Before this step, as explained before, I extruded certain faces on the threads before duplicating them(thats why there is some depth on the threads).
Basically, to duplicate such a nice round, you will have to adjust the center pivot to a favorable position and change into the rotate tool. Change the values(rotate on the x-axis) in the duplicate special tool so that the threads will look nicely together like shown above. (In this step, if we include a deformer, we can animate the threads to go in a loop.)

After adding some shapes, extruding, managing vertices I got this shown above. Duplicating the first one to form a clone on the left front wheel. Special note is taken to make sure the topology and edge flow is smooth.

Now, after adding certain details to the side wheels to make it more armory, I duplicated it and scaled it to form the longer back tank threads. I admit I got a little lazy here, I was actually supposed to redo the tank threads steps again but I got lazy. So I ended up duplicating it.

Well, after this step is basically adding the turret and building details on it.
That's how I derived to my final model.


In this post, what I really want to bring forth to help teach is not how to model a tank.
But rather, how to set up proper reference images. Because, it is hard to teach people how to actually do edge loops at certain important locations or teaching them which face to actually extrude. Rather, the person must find that out on their own.

That's what I think.

Model that I based on

Reference
Setting up Reference Images