Experimental Mobile Armour

The XMA-001 is a kitbashed mechanized tank I created in Cinema 4D. It is textured and rendered using Octane Render and uses a combination of procedurally generated textures and UV mapping. The majority of the tank is created using parts from Nick Govacko's free kitbash collection along with a handful of components from Kitbash3D's Tanks kit. Let's take a look at the process of creating this model.

After finding some initial examples of both existing mech designs and machinery, I decided to start with the legs. As these would be duplicated, it would mean I only had to get the design of one down to complete them all. The main design concept I tried to keep whilst putting these together was a sense of functionality. Even though this is a sci-fi concept, I wanted it to feel like it would still operate as you’d expect, with this in mind I added multiple points of articulation along with hydraulics to operate them. An earlier design had a simple hinge joint that connected the legs to the body however this didn’t articulate correctly if the mech was to walk so I switched it for the ball joint.​​​​​​​{+

The main body shape came from a hull element in the kitbash tanks kit. Whilst I was happy with the general shape, it did not fit well with the design of the legs when I placed an armour texture on it. The level of detail in the legs far outdid the texture so I decided to use the hull shape as a base and add plating to it from the kitbash.

One part I couldn’t get right initially were the cables I wanted to have coming from the main barrel. Although there were plenty of cables in the kitbash, none of them fit in a way that looked right. Instead I decided to model the cables and connectors myself.

The final part I built was the defensor bits on the back. I still wanted to keep the idea of functionality with this element so I cloned them across a sphere to ensure I had enough to create a functional shield but not too many that they wouldn’t fit onto the back. This had the added effect of looking like spider eyes which perfectly fit the theme of the mech.

Despite having made many renders before this one, there is one part of my skill set that requires a lot of improvement - UV Mapping. The goal of this project was to make a start on improving those skills and gain a basic level of understanding of the process required to create UV maps for 3D models.

Cinema 4D R23 came with a lot of updates to its UV mapping tools which made the process of learning much more accessible and meant I wasn't having to look outside of C4D to do UV mapping. Following the amazing tutorial by EJ Hassenfratz over at School of Motion, I was able to gain a basic grasp of where to begin unfolding an object and how to approach the idea of UV mapping any given object.

I created two base materials - an under metal and a painted metal. The under metal was a simple metallic mix, one light and one dark, masked by a damage map and dirt node. The painted metal came from Greyscale Gorilla’s everyday materials pack, I modified the amount of damage shown and altered the colour to match better to military armour plating.

As this model isn’t for sale or a client, I decided to focus on the parts of the UV maps I needed to add decals to rather than ensure every inch of the model was perfectly mapped. This is far from the correct way to map parts but ultimately it wouldn’t have served any purpose and would’ve just been a lot of wasted time. A lot of the parts used in this kitbash weren’t modelled with UV mapping in mind and their topology is very triangulated making full UV mapping difficult. I mapped out the main parts and left the rest to the automatic tools.

With the parts (mostly) UV mapped I printed out two angles of the tank and began inking out the decals onto tracing paper using fine liners. Doing it this way gave me a better overall look at mech to ensure I wasn’t duplicating too many decals in the same place. Ultimately I did more decal designs than I used however this overall view helped narrow down the choices.

I applied each decal to it’s relevant UV map and created a new mix texture that mixed the plating texture from before with a dark grey diffuse material. If I had wanted to simplify this I could’ve combined groups of plates together so their UV maps would be one texture. As it was, I ended up creating an individual text for each new decal. This was fine for my needs but wouldn’t have been a good solution if this model was to be sold or used by others.

With the main texturing done I added a simple emission texture to the ring of the defensor bits and a horizontal lines texture for the mech’s ‘eye’. Small amounts of subdivision were needed to smooth out some awkward angles on some components. A soldier model I had was added to give a sense of the scale of this mech for the initial style shot.

I’ve learnt alot about UV mapping during this project, although not perfect, the basic understanding of where to make seams and how to split up parts of a model have been valuable learning. For my next project I plan to create something with perfect UV maps that might be used in any program or for client use.