The task was to create a mech design in 2 days and bring it to life.
Its a very fast process of putting together shapes and materials to form mechanical parts. I started
with the legs first and worked me up to the main cockpit and guns.
Some
parts a copy/paste, because you don´t want to waste time in this tight
shedule. But since you are in the process of creating parts i combined
them with each other to form more complex pieces. A little bit of bend
here and there and you get completly new pieces to stick together.
After that was done i had to create the Mech itself, after several attempts to put together a two leged mech, i decided i try four legs.
And thats how i found my design and worked around that. The cockpit neded to have 4 connection points for the leg mechanic. Also the weight needed to be found. So the leg are spread further away from the body to give it a more heavy look.
Finally the rendering part started. It was hard to learn all the basics again after working so long with realtime rendering workpipelines. All the setup and materials needed to be fine tuned. And i know its still far from perfect, but i will improve my skills in rendering.
I also made some small experiments. The first one was to put my hardsurface stuff into Zbrush to try out Dynamesh and the result was very good, somethig to remember for melting pieces together.
The second one was to render it with toon shader to have a manga/anime look, also to see a mechanical drawing of the mech.
Final thoughts - It was a nice exercise in creating a mech and speed model some design for concepting. Also the refreshing of knowledge in offline render was nice to have. I tried also to work in a lineare workflow to have a faster result.
The CH53X lowpoly project i started in the beginning of 2015. Its a "small" texturing and modelling exercise to test out MARI texture painting. I started out with a highpoly of the CH53 chassy and kitbashed futuristic engines on it to transform the helicopter into a VTOL. After i finished the highpoly model i used the mesh to build the lowpoly model and unwrapped the lowpoly. When this was
done i baked out the normal maps for all the different parts. later i put everything into MARI and painted the diffuse texture on it, was alot of fun. Now the hard part - getting everthing into the Cryengine and make it look nice. Since Cryengine has now a PBR pipeline for all the textures i had to convert them all into the right color formats. Tweaking the shader was taking me a while to get it right and "realistic". Since the CH53X was a bit empty in my scene i was looking into reference pictures and decided to build a aircraft carrier bridge with flight deck. I used the Essex class since i like all the shapes of the bridge. Texturing was not so hard like the CH53X, all tileable textures on the bridge. For the flightdeck i made some dirt decals to give it a used look. When both models (Ch53X and the aircraft carrier) were done i arranged my scenes i wanted to render out. I looked also into military reference pictures of aircrafts to have some intresting shots. Now everything was ready to be rendered - just tweaking time of day and rendering settings in cryengine and i was done. Project completed! 
