Halo

Just kidding.

I wanted to make this thread for a few reasons.

Firstly is to show a work in progress from start to finish, something I've not seen done much anymore and its a shame because its akin to going on a journey and watching how something grows and changes over time.

Secondly can also serve as an excellent source of information to learn for both the audience and the creator, be it through suggestion of functions, techniques or simply a re-routing of edges for better mesh flow.

(Note this is NOT a tutorial but if you do learn something from it then awesome)

Finally, I want to use it as a display that things don't start off perfect, occasionally there are mistakes that crop up over time regardless of how used to it you may be.

Oftentimes people see the final product and think "I wish I could make it that perfect" but the truth is it doesn't always start out that way.

So here is the starting piece, I wasn't sure where to begin but a full body would have ruined the whole "starting from the beginning" but a nose would have been too little, so without further adieu I present to you the beginning of the lift master, the great flying whale, the second largest helicopter in the world...the Mi-26 Halo.

I use the Mi-26 a fair bit in A2, its a great heli. I think mine was made by (OWP) for FP, not sure. There are six variants inc the crashed model. But its nice to see a newer version under way, will be interested in watching progress.

Correct, the Nashe Orujie (Our Weapons) Mi-26 way back from OFP, it was really ahead of its time.

Stage 1 on body building has been completed. Normally you'd not show a wireframe at this stage with this method because there is a lot of cleanup involved afterward (building a blocky model composed of mostly squares and then using subdivision to smooth it out) but I found that looking at wireframes of others to be one of the most helpful things for me when I was beginning to model.

It demonstrated what meshflow is and its importance with how it manipulates light (amongst other things) which is especially important if like me you want the way light bounces off the mesh to be as close to the real thing as possible.

I'm still not sold on the topmost engine faring though, that will likely require some more tweaking.

Really liking the outcome of using subdivision modelling, it will require a fair bit of cleanup in the end but the dense mesh makes it easy to add new things and cut parts out without having to go in and do a lot of tweaking or making some nasty poles.

Also altered the meshflow along the backside, while it wouldn't have made much difference in terms of lighting it was still a waste that would need to be cleaned up later.

Also added more edgeloops along the faring to get a smoother light transition rather than a ugly sharp change.

Speaking of bad lighting, the technique I used when redoing the topology on the back caused the angle between the frame and door to be too sharp of a change that it resulted in completely different properties.

I don't think the wrong one needs to be pointed out.

Optimized the mesh, 3723 faces vs 2107

From a nice pretty clean quad layout to a bunch of ugly lines and triangles everywhere with no particular pattern...oh well, such is the nature of making a mesh for games.

Could probably use some more optimizing but that won't be in a set update.