Hello all,

The idea started in the thread here

So in order of not highjacking that thread, I copy paste my questions over here and start a seperate thread.

Ok, I gave this a thought and desided to give it a try.
At some point people realy wanted a suit like this and offered money and even a sister.
The sister part was the thing for me to deside to model this suit.
If she is hansom, let me know and I give my adress, hey who can blame me..I am a single guy.
:lol:

Ok, all jokes aside.

DISCLAIMER.
It is as it is, a try.
I am not a pro modeler but a begining hobby modeler who likes a chalange.
I will try to model the suit as acurate as posible, and probably need some help along the line.
Dont hang me on times, I have a very busy work life, so I only can model in the litle free time I have.
I never done rigging before, so this wil be the first time in that department.

If there are other modelers who want to give it a try, by all means dont wait on me and do so

Ok, that aside,
Like discused in the other thread, the suit will be a stand alone figure.
However I consider to model the inside of the neck part, this way you can make the helmet invisible and place lets say V-4 inside the suit.
If you make all of V-4 invisible accept the head, it looks that she is wearing the suit.
The helmet can be easely made as a seperate prop.

Do's the suit needs to be UV mapped or collored by shaders?
And do you want to have the lines modeled or added by bump mapping?
I run into 2 different styles mainly.
One is the "rounded" style, i.o.w. all parts are rounded off.
One is the "edgie" style, all parts have sharp edges.

I post screen shots later on when I have some results and keep you updated on the process.

The suit needs to be poseable, so it needs to be rigged, which will make it a figure and not a prop.  Like I said I don't think there is any purpose in rigging the figure anything like V4 if you don't want to, although it may save you a lot of work to use the "V4 Dev" rig that is included with V4 - however this means the figure MUST be proportioned and the polygons grouped very similar to V4 for it to work correctly.  If I were you I'd look into Phil Cooke's video tutorials on Poser rigging and rig it from scratch.
www.philc.net

Yes the model really should be Uvmapped, and in fact will probably be pretty easy to UVmap since it has many acceptable places to cut seams into it, unlike human skin.  You can take a chainsaw to it and cut it into many pieces and it won't be a big deal, since it is made of many separate mechanical parts (again unlike human skin).  This is a good project for you to learn UVmapping on since you don't have to worry too much about keeping everything as close to a single continuous UVmap as possible.

The lines and all the fine detail, it would be a good idea to do that with bump mapping, or better, DISPLACEMENT mapping - bump mapping cannot alter the profile of the model, so the horizon would appear just as smooth whether there is 100% bump or 0% bump.  Displacement mapping actually creates polygons and can disturb the profile in a very convincing way if done well, so you may want to look into it.  If you do it purely with the model's geometry, then this will add MANY MANY polygons where you have that kind of detail going on - while this is OK for a specialty model, and I'm sure people won't really care too much, for something like a 1mm crease in all the armor plate sections, that will add up to a whole lot of polygons.  In any case you will probably find it easier to be consistent across the entire model if you do that kind of detail with bump mapping or displacement mapping.  If you do it by cutting it into the geometry of the model, you will probably find it extremely difficult to keep it 100% consistent everywhere.

There is a good reason to not leave all the edges sharp everwhere - when your users render your model with Smooth Polygons render option turned on, those sharp corners will get rounded off and bulge a little bit.  Take a 6 polygon cube into Poser and render it with Smooth Polygons on and see what I mean, you'll understand.  You will notice that a ton of the Poser content out there that is low poly, including the cube primitive included with Poser itself, has had all the polygons' edges split so they will be immune to polygon smoothing - this works, but imo it is better to model in a way that actually takes advantage of polygon smoothing, because it is good technology if you use it correctly.  Look into modeling for Reyes renderers and how Poser's polygon smoothing really works, experiment with what happens with different approaches to edge topology - or you can just force your model to be immune to it once you have it rigged by un-checking "smooth polygons" for every bodypart.

Typically, very high poly count models work with Smooth Polygons without any problems, it's the lower poly models that you need to be careful with. 

@pjz99

Yes as I mentioned I plan to make it a figure, so its a stand alone.
I only use Alice as a mannequin to keep things in proportion.
To me, Alice her body comes close to the original.

I was thinking of bump/displacement mapping to for the seems, looking at it now, I think the model wil already be poly heavy becouse of the many details.
Good info on the displacement mapping, I take a look at it and experiment a litle with it.
And now I finaly know what is the diference between bump and displacement mapping :biggrin:

I gues this wil be one of the more easy models to UV map, as you mentioned there are enough places to make a seem.
I use blender to model, and UV mapping is not one of its strong points though.
But the many litle panels should make it better to handle in Blender.

I have to look into the edge thing, if I use smooth in Blender I have to use edge split to keep edges crisp.
However there is also a option where you use angles, so I have to study that part a bit.
I had some experience with the smooth poly option in Poser.
So far I discovered that only large poly's blow up and get out of proportion.
I am not afraid that that will happen to the model since it uses a lot of detail and edges, so there will not be any big poly's.
But I will do some experiments to be on the save side

Thanks for the info, this is shure something to look into more and study.

Creating the helmet as a separate prop is a great idea! In many amazing fanart images, Samus is depicted without the helmet, and be able to recreate them would be wonderful.

I can be of little help regarding the technical aspect of the modeling work  (otherwise I'd be able to model it myself!) but I can provide a gazillion of reference images and measurements.

For example, this is a concept art of the body inside the suit (flagged for nudity to be safe). It's not anatomically perfect, but it's a start point (besides being a very good art).

Giorgio

@giorgio_2004

Thanks for the help.

Measurements would be great.

Also some pictures from the front, side and back when she stands in a neutral position. (like your picture)

I have some detailed pictures of a model, but they are all in a action pose witch makes it harder to define details.**
**

To be honest, I wouldn't model the suit around a specific figure, a couple reasons:

There are too many different figures people would want to use the suit on

Too many problems with poke through

make the helmet a separate object we can remove and place a figure's head on the suit for a "removed" look. (look at my attached image)

You wouldn't have to make the rest of the suit in "parts", just make it set up so we can make parts invisible if we just wanted like the cannon on her arm or something along that line.

This is just a few opinons, but I would really suggest making it a separate figure, the suit alone would stand by itself (no pun intended) as a figure rather than an add on for other figures.

Yes as I mentioned.

The suit will be a stand alone figure on its own.

I only use Alice as a measurement, to keep things in proportion.
The suit will not be conforming to Alice or any other figure.

Every part will get its own material/UV map, so you can make it invisible as you like.

Making the canon a seperate prop might be a nice idea.
The helmet will be a seperate prop already.

oh, whoops, I misunderstood then :D

sounds like a good plan, maybe I should make the Guyver there a kind of Fusion suit then :P

:biggrin:

No worry.

Curently I am waiting on Giorgio to send me some more info.
I already started to set up the basics for the suit.

so now, how much you want for this?

who you got working on textures?

What I want for it?

Hmmmm, lets see...ethernal fame, a pat on the back and a virtual cold beer :biggrin:

And I will do the texturing myself.

well, I think I can do all but the eternal fame... if ya need any help with textures, give me a holler, I'd like to contribute to this in any way I can and not just be a mooch

Ah, the ethernal ame is not that importand

Thanks, when I need some help, I will announce it in this thread.