Franscisco Javier Castillo del Aguila - Rookies Award Entry - Hard Surface and some Material creation

After some training in simple bots or videogame controllers, this was my first big project in which I brought together all that I had made for over year since I started with 3D: a T-34 tank with some extra tuning. I have always been keen on history as a hobby, and especially interested in war machines throughout the years. So, when I had the opportunity to choose a project, I decided to go for the big old-fashioned tank. Apart from an opportunity to fulfil some child dreams, it was an excellent opportunity to develop my hard surface modeling skills.

I modeled it in Autodesk Maya, shaded in Substance Painter, and made some post-production and composition in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere for the video production. 

Flakpanzer T-34

The T-34/76 was a Soviet medium tank that had a profound and lasting effect on the field of tank design. It was introduced in 1940. It was superior to any other tank in the world, including the feared German tanks. It had a revolutionary design featured sloped armor, speed, hitting power and low silhouette along with reliability and low production costs. For that reason, it was often captured by German forces and put again into operation in Panzer formations.

The Flakpanzer T-34(r) was one of the most interested conversions ever made by German army of one captured soviet T-34/76. Probably damaged in the turret, this was a T-34 chassis rearmed with a 20mm Flakvierling 38. The armament was mounted in a turret made by field workshop (Werkstattkompanie 653) using armor plates from damaged half-tracks. Ammunition was stored in metal cases on a rack at the rear of the vehicle.

The T-34/76 chassis was 16 ft 10 in (5.12 m) long and 9 ft 10 in (3 m) wide.

This is my first hard surface character. Unlike the tank, this project had no blueprints, so this was my first 3/4 view design. It was pretty challenging to get the blockout and the proper proportions so that my bot had a stylized but strong and heavy profile, like a comic superhero, with a pretty strong chest and bag, but still fit and athletic. I applied all my knowledge in hard surface modeling from previous projects to obtain the best possible results I can produce. I am pretty proud of the result. This was also my first rigging attempt to make the skeleton of the character and FK controls, and I enjoyed the process, too.

I modeled and rigged it in Autodesk Maya, shaded in Substance Painter, and made some post-production and composition in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere for the video production. Animation is from a Mixamo animation.

Robot Concept Nº 4

Concept art by BOSi Art Studios. In the original concept, you can see a weapon that is somehow attached to the bag, but I did not have enough information, so I modeled the robot without the gun. For the presentation, I modeled a fighting cage because I imagined it would be awesome to see such a powerful bot in a robot combat.

Original Concept by BOSi Art Studio

Wood and nature material

The last project I would like to share is a self-made texture. After my hard surface projects, I started to look into environments, focusing on procs, which is a work field where a Junior like me could find some job. And, somehow, I ended up studying how to create tileable textures with Substance Designer. This is my first personal one without any help.

I have seen a lot of materials designed in Substance Designer, but most of them are just one material or, at least, they do not appear to be offered as a material you can change and edit with exposed inputs. The idea was to search where the limit is in a very complex material, with a bunch of layers (grass, leaves, fallen flowers, cracks, different wood bonding,…) and make it work. It was necessary to create logical and comparison nodes to make it work properly, so it was definitely really fun and I am really proud of the result.