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.
