This dude has taken up most of my work life for the past several months. The client went nuts on requests but the customer is always right. Which means....do more, for cheaper......in less time.

Great project from a 3d standpoint. We've all learned a lot from this guy when it comes to materials, rendering, and more specifically, monster files. During the render, there are around 3 million polys. Unfortunately, our workstations are only running 32 bit Windows XP and are crashing like drunk teenagers playing Gran Turismo at Laguna Seca.  On the flip side, the render farm rocks and is performing like a champ. A 2048 x 1536 render takes around 5 minutes but looks great.

For the entirety of the vehicle, there are 152 bitmap textures that utilize 251mb of disc space and their creation ate up most of the development time. Every single sticker, gauge, doohickey and whatchamacallit was recreated as accurately as possible in vector, exported as bitmaps then scaled down to hopefully keep our workstations stable.

I can't take total credit for this as the three of us havel been laboring over it for the past several months and will continue to do so for some time. You'll probably notice a few inconsistencies in the model here and there. For now, we're trying to get still renders out and ready to drop into Flash for the interactive lessons while simultaneously fixing and adding things we didn't notice from the reference before.

I've just completed work on the M2A3 (Bradely Fighting Vehicle) Driver's Instrument Panel. We're currently developing distance learning on this vehicle, the Up Armored HMMWV, and the M1A1 Abrams. Each vehicle gets an in-depth look of familiarization, operation, and maintenance. With the final renders (not shown here) the Flash developers will create a fully interactive set of panels that react to the user's input. Each switch can be toggled, the buttons can be pushed, and all lights will illuminate based on the panel's settings.

The hardest part of the development process was the creation of the base textures. I was lucky enough to have plenty of reference images to work from, but they all had to be converted to something a lot more viable for modeling and texturing. I started by taking the reference images into Photoshop and using the "Lens Correction" filter to remove the lens distortion from the camera as well as realign the edges of the panels to true North/South/East/West directions. From there, the rest was traditional tracing in Illustrator. Each piece of text, icon and line were carefully recreated in vector format then exported to high resolution jpg images. In addition to the texture, the base layout of the panels were created in Illustrator, then imported to 3ds Max so that proper ratio was maintained.

Inside of Max, simple poly modeling techniques created all of the toggle switches, buttons and lights. I opted for a Photometric light to illuminate the scene and rendered each layer (lights only/toggle switches only) against a duplicate matte panel layer as png files. The same workflow was used to create the Mobile Gun System interface for the Striker Fighting Vehicle.

We're on a pretty tight schedule so I'm already onto the next thing.