[Becco_UK]

Back in 1970, Gerry and Sylvia Andersons' UFO TV series was broadcast. The series was about a secret military organisation (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation (SHADOW)) which defends the Earth from Alien invaders.

Some nice air, sea and land based vehicles were included in the UFO TV Series and one I've been making for a while now is the SHADO mobile.

This model is being made using Cinema4D by Maxon http://www.maxon.net/index.php?id=190&L=0 and the previews rendered with Maxwell Render 1.7.1

So, making a start, this Maxwell Render preview is of the assembled plans which I obtained from http://ufoseries.com/index.html

[Becco_UK]

The modelling had to start somewhere. I chose this to be the exhaust silencer that protrudes through the bodywork. Because the silencer body has a constant cylindrical cross section, making this first helps to get the curved corners of the mobiles main bodywork more accurate.

[Becco_UK]

The wheels have been modelled from nothing more elaborate than a cylinder with loop knife cuts and a series of selective polygon extrudes.

This wheel preview is the one being used to represent the plain surface wheel - the front and rear wheels have a surface 'ribbing' structure. To keep the polygon count low(ish) only selective edge bevelling has been done so far.

[Becco_UK]

So, with the wheels in place it seemed a good time to add some tracks. A modified cube is arranged uniformly around a spline using Mikael Sterners' Multiple Spline Attach (MSA) plugin from http://www.xlentplugs.com/

[Mattia Sullini]

Great! A new WIP from you...following closely

[Becco_UK]

A closer look at the wheels and tracks. The track structure on the real model is individual blocks linked by to several rubber strips. My digital model doesn't have them connected yet because I still need to get to grips with trying out some animation ideas.

[Becco_UK]

Now the body gets underway. This stage of the body was reached after a few failed attempts. I had hoped to make this from one mesh but doing so was resulting in high poly counts in areas of the model where this was a waste. I opted to break this down into several components and connect/weld them together.

[Becco_UK]

The bodywork with the section just in front of the exhaust silencer completed and the cab started.

[Becco_UK]

Detail starts to get added to the cab and front area. At this stage I had been wondering whether to make the cab doors functional or not.

[Becco_UK]

By time I had reached this stage I made up my mind about the doors. They will stay closed. I have found no evidence that the original studio model had opening doors so I will use simple lines and bump map to represent doors on the digital version.

Some detail has been added to the cab area and this preview also made use of trying a material with some metal - in this example a seperate layer using Aluminium IOR data.

[Becco_UK]

Returning back to the wheels, these are to have their own texture maps/ materials and will be painting just one ribbed wheel and one plain wheel. Copies will be rotated so they don't all look the same. Here they are in their own scene with a Maxwell Sub Surface Scattering material applied.

[Becco_UK]

The wheels UV mapped with BodyPaint and as usual, I also baked ambient occlusion onto the wheels which is to be used as a 'dirt' mask layer in Paint Shop Pro.

[Becco_UK]

The wheels ready to transfer back to the model. A temporary Maxwell material is being used here and will be finalised when some better lighting is used instead of the present plain skydome.

[-Adrian]

Wow that looks great. Looking forward to more!

[Becco_UK]

By now I've decided to keep the track peices as individual objects with some swept splines to form the thin link bands. Not ideal but allows easier animation of the tracks instead of animating a single track object - the swept splines will stay static and I hope that will not be too noticable. The model is seen here with the wheels back in place and the track blocks UV mapped with a basic Maxwell 'rubber' material applied. Ambient Occlusion was used as a dirt mask.

This preview includes the start of the rotating radar assembly. I don't like the radar plans too much but they gave a good indication of the radar dish shape.