Tauchpanzer model

     As mentioned before I am creating a Tauchpanzer model for this project, I already created a quick trial version to see how I would cope with this and have begun working on the real thing the last couple of weeks, unfortunately I was pretty ill in this time and had to take about a week out. Nevertheless I have made reasonable progress and developed a better understanding of Maya- though I will need to speed up my pace if I intend to meet the deadline. The images below outline my progress so far:

The biggest problem to begin with was to find some decent reference images, although there were many useful side profiles, a detailed front view was much harder to find. In the end I opted for the the two pictured here which are actually different models, as our game story alternates history somewhat the tank doesn't have to be exactly the same so this will be fine.

Next I began creating the main body of the tank, this has been halved so once it is ready I can duplicate it and get a symmetrical mesh, as well as it halfing some of the work I need to do. Since doing this in my trial version we were given a lecture in which we were discouraged from using the boolean tool. This made things difficult as I had used the difference tool to create the wheel arches on that attempt and so here had to work out an alternate way of doing this.

Once I had sorted this I extruded the next level of the tank, the part on which the gun would be mounted. This was relatively easy, just a case of extruding some basic shapes from the main mesh and adjusting them to replicate the angles of the tank.

After this I made the gun for the tank, at this point one of our tutors Lothar helped me out, advising to make the extra features of the tank as separate objects, which would make a lot of the shapes easier to produce, therefor the gun shape you see are actually two separate meshes.

The object here is a section of the tank track, these can be duplicated and angled, then slotted together to create the tracks for the tank. Lothar pointed out to me that this shape has excess geometry, edges that aren't being used for anything, and these should be deleted in order to make the shape more efficient. I built this shape starting with a cylinder, this was useful as the pivot for the object is already centred within the cylinder which makes it easier when it comes to angling it.

This is the cog that drives the tracks on the tank. For this Lothar showed me how to soften/harden edges on a mesh to give it a more, less curved look.

Cogwheel at the back of the tank- again this is made of two different meshes

 Track support and main wheels. Found the centre of the wheels difficult.

This is the track pieces duplicated and angled to create the tracks. Unfortunately I need to redo these. the geometry isn't correct and I need to fix the uvs before duplicating the shape. This will save time later.

These five images show some of the extra details I have added to the tank. Once more these are all separate from the main mesh. I want the end result of this project to look really impressive and I feel that creating mass detail will help this.

Images like this I find quite inspiring as well as useful to show me what kind of standard I should be striving for.