Aztek

Hey Dat, I noticed your feet are kind of rigid. Why don't you slide thim out a hair, like on the 1/48, then you'd be able to pivot them on the ankle joint to make them parallel with the surface? I had to shorten my footwell (?) so that when extended my feet don't "look" like they are extended.

LOL, I never associated a valk with a chick. But I guess your right. Most valks usually hive a big chest and nice hips and thighs. They need to get a glute machine and work on their kadunkadunk though ...

C-130's is still where my heart is at. It was a great aircraft to maintain and fly on. I'n glad there is someone on the forums who can appreciate the effort that goes in to getting aircraft up and down safely.

Rod, Thanks. Japan has been sucking the life out of me. I went from a training base with A-10s and -130's to a combat F-16 unit, so the tempo is worlds apart. I spent about 40 hours this week working a broke -16 and was one step away from getting some support from Lockheed for a fix before we nailed the malfunction. Fixing planes has been getting more attention than drawing them lately. I squeezed out those renders while burning some midnight oil. I'll try and get more active once things slow up a lil (like that will happen!) Also, your valk is sweet. You know that. But were you going for the plastic toy look? or are you trying to go photo realistic? I just noticed your texs are pretty bright and solid. I am SOOOOO not knocking your work man, I'm just trying to figure out the direction you're going in.

and posed render ...

next ...

Rod here's some captures and a render of my set of hands. I have the hands linked together and skinned at the joints (mostly the black areas). I have a 3 joints in the wrist to give it all the motion our forearms and wrist usualy provide. Hope these help. Scans from Macross Design Works were invaluable for this. It has some ortho hand views you can use.

I got 5 kids so I keep them out of their reach about 2 feet from the ceiling on a shelf. I've never had any incidents, but since I've moved to Japan (earthquake central, worse than california) I've had to keep most in fighter mode. The only drawback is every 2 months or so I have to knock off the dut that accumulates.

Rod, Your lowvis valk's scheme looks spot on. I think your renderer accents the panel lines a lil too much, but I'm sure the production renderer would take care of that with the raytracing and such. As far as the textures go, search the www.af.mil site, specifically aerial refueling pics. They have awesome shots, well lit, a variety of paint jobs and super high res (at least as far as aviation websites go). It gives a good sample of the diff levels of cleanliness aircraft have. Lemme know if your not finding the shots I'm describing here. I'll link you some if you can't. For everyone else, af.mil has a lot of good ref material especially from the maintenance perspective (ground shots) and in flight perspective (AR shots)

Radd, Damn I AM glad I'm over here. I could barely sweet talk my lady outta the 120 bucks. The other cool thing is they have Macross on clearance from time to time, so you get even better deals. I can't remember the price, but the Max and Milia 1/72s were on special a while back and it seemed like a steal at the time I just didn't have the desire to get them. Oh well, I don't see the Konig getting marked down any time soon.

I usually don't post in the toy forums, but this is just too sweet. I went and picked mine up from the local TRU Japan (I'm lucky to be stationed here) and just unpacked it and did the initial xform to gerwalk. I can't believe how many joints this thing has! Yamato out did themselves on this one. I can't even imagine what the IHP version was like. The exchange rate right now kinda blows, but I got mine for 120 ish. It was definately money well spent. Ok, I have some quirks to figure out with the xform sequence, so I'm out. I just hadta share the joy!

Damn DG, I wish I woulda modeled my valk in Maya just so I could pick your guys' brains on rigging. Is there anyone elso out there who uses Max and has a fairly decent valk rig?

Dat, I like the views you used to show off the hasegawa refs. I noticed you had to fatten up the nose (like me), but did you fatten (widen, from top down view) the chest/backplate assy? I did a little, I can't remember how moch, but I think it was like 7 percent on the x axis. This made the chest look more anime in battroid mode, and also set my legs whaen in fighter mode farther apart. This gave me the flexibility to fatten the legs and arms, hopefully to avoid valkanorexia.

Here's my wire.

Here we go, first image is a textured wing and looking outbd inset to show the airfoil I stuck with.

ALOT better. I'll post some of my wires and model to show you how I tackled that mini beast. Sometimes words can't do what a few graphics can do.

I just looked at your recent render Dat, Forgive the primitivity of the attachment, I tweaked it in MSPaint at work. The wingtip from an ortho front view should be more like the inset. The mesh may be easier to model if you model it as a seperate object and then weld it to your main wing. You are limited to the vertices that attach it to the main wing, so some wing redesign may need to happen. Also, from this angle, the wing looks kinda thin, toyish almost. I'd apply a scale modifier to the z-axis (or whatever axis you have set to the direction of the arrow) and scale it wider until it barely clears the notch in the backplate w/o clipping it. This should also round the leading edge some more, and give you room for more flap track and spolier detail, if you are shooting for this. I wanted my wings to look fat and functional I think I may have even widened my notch in the backplate to accomodate the wing design I stuck with. You've come along way since your first few models that resembled the 1/72 Yammies. I'm only picking this apart since you've seemed to shift gears toward realism.

Some noticeable jaggies, Dat. Can you increase the resolution of the panel lines or is it the bump renderer?

Dat, From wing root to outboard edge, the wing usually runs the same airfoil. The airfoil is the shape if the wing if you sliced it in half and looked at it from the side. Believe it or not, the airfoil has the same basic makeup on highspeed aircraft as on heavies (cargo). Rounded front and trailing to a tip at the trailing edge. I took an airfoil I was happy with and splined it out in 2d. I extruded that spline all the way out to the wingtip assembly, the housing that has the formation and index lights. Scale it down to pattern the narrowing of the wing as it goes more outbd. The pain in the ass is cutting out and modeling flaps, spoilers, and wingtip assembly. Getting the roundeness, almost like half a teardrop from scracth, at least from me, was a bear. Hopefully Woz's pimp ass wing will help you out some more.

The riveting isn't normally visible in the CG renders we've seen dealing with the valk. The "dots" you textured are screws and their size is relatively close to real world after you figure in the wear around the paint surrounding the screw. Rivets are usually so small, flush and numerous, that the factory paint usually conceals them. As individual rivets loosen over time due to stress and failure, they protrude through the paint and begin to emit fuel,lube or hydro stains and streaks. This usually happens in onezies and twozies, not completely along a panel or wing spar. If it did, there would be a major failure along a spar or rib, usually the result of cracking, and repair would be necessary. What you've got is good. I have the same style texture on mine. What I wanted to do in the future is lighten and blend about 40-50 percent of the visible screws into the base paint scheme of the valk. During panel removal not ALL of the screws are messed up so bad that they give off the signs of weathering that we have on our textures. Alot go back in so well that they blend back in to the structure, and when doing a preflight or post flight inspection, would not even be visible as a fastener unless you were specifically looking for it. Sorry I went on a tangent with this rivet detail, but I can appreciate the work you are putting in to your valk, so I wanted you to have this to use if you though it would enhance the realism. Also, When removing/replacing panels and the panel is a bitch coming off, we usually replace the screws rather than putting half rounded out screws back in. The panel is not repainted, nor are the screws. This ends up with zinc plated screws only being visible around the panel. It would be a cool effect to add to the valk on certain high maintenance panels. Maybe on one of the leg panels for engine maintenance. And some wing panels near the flaps, where the flap actuators would be. The zinc plated hardware is an aviation standard. It's a very light gold/yellow color. Again, just an idea I have and no time on my part to implement yet.

David, I thought the Wolf Pack was at the Kun, (Kunsan?) Also, I'm finally in Japan and workin with the Wild Weasels of the 35th. We got the CGs and about half the fleet online with the CCIP modification. I'm finishing up an Egress (ACES II ejection seat) training course so the -16 world for me right now is pretty tight. I never thought too much about -16s till I got here and started working them. Now I fly them all the time in FS2004 and Jane's USAF. I can't wait till this game comes out so I can hot dog with my kids when I come home pissed off from working on lawn darts all day. Also another Pacific Air Forces folk lore unit is the Fightin' Chickens (Cocks?) down at Kadena. They are the ones with the tail code of ZZ who supposedly flaked out during an incident in Vietnam where an airstrip was overrun and the maintainers were hung from the rafters with safety wire (lock wire). Supposedly the ZZ unit was to provide close air support and didn't come through. They were then (by the story) barred from returning stateside till they proved themselves in combat. This has been the way the story usually unfolds. One Chief Master Sergeant I talked to who was stationed at Kadena said this was UNTRUE since Kadena served honorably in Desert Storm. I dunno. There's alot of history in the units around the world. I'm glad to see it trickle into games and the media the way it does sometimes.

Dat, I don't know if this is what your looking for, but here is a clip from my leg texture. I had black panel lines I drew in Illustrator. I copied them and pasted them as a path in Photoshop, rasterized, embossed, and then inverted the image. Copy that new "inverted embossed panel line" on to your generic white "base coat" and you should get a similar result. My weathering isn't as accurate as I'd like it, so all I did was gaussian blur my panel lines to simulate wear. All my textures are in this resolution, so it makes rendering a bear. After I get all my texs finished and have my details the way I like, I'll resize them down to a processor friendly size.

I made a valk in a 3D prog and fly it around my comp when I get bored. That's as far as I've pursued this discussion. I'm in the Air Force now and if you've seen as many cracked ribs, spars, and bulkheads, stress cracks, corrosion, bird strikes, loose fasteners, delaminated topcoat and 5 minute flap retraction sequences using aux pumps you'd understand why this is so not going to happen anytime soon. Structurally, the metals and fastener techniques are still 1960/70's (minus composites and fibers - stealth) The powerplant isn't my cup of tea, but if you ever saw 50,000 or so pounds of thrust push an F-15 down the runway and were a little bit touched, then fire up DYRL and watch them dance about with god knows what under their hood. At the same time mind you, you have about a 1/4 million rivets and fasteners holding it all together. But what if it's cast? Casted metal cracks and is susceptible to fatigue. Sh#! happens when you fight zentraedi ... What if they use a super high tech welding, bonding technique? They crack too, and don't hold up too well when partially ground down from being slammed into a building. I dunno, I've seen alot of sheeyaat in aircraft maintenance. But no valks yet. Never been to Tonopah yet though. Always a good time to request special duty ...

Looks sweet Dat, From the second angle it looks like the side armor should be taller; to compensate for the "calf" armor. Then again it may just be the perspective. Also, did you notch the armor where the ventral fins jut out against it?

Thanks agent, your valk is pimp the way it is right now if you're going low poly. I like the proportions you are using, it seems your going more anime than straight aviation. Which is a welcome change since most here are following realism. In the end, your proportions may be more true to the story than ours. But I don't think you'll be happy till you crank up the polys and start inserting some detail. My model is not efficient by any means. That pose is about 220k polys. That's minus the gear and cockpit detail which I deleted to speed up render and modeling. Add another 100k for a complete valk. Keep your updates coming. Can't wait to see you skin it.