Official X-COM Fan Art thread

[Neorapsta]

I think what he means is that the bottom part comes a bit too far forward, so it kinda looks wrong

[Bomb Bloke]

'Wrong' is a good discription.

[Silverblade-T-E]

Inspired by XCOM, but rendered in more modern graphics and with resources available to little old me, also with artistic tweaks etc

Call it "XCOM-ish" hehe.

 

Gonna re-render this I think with a different lighting.

Scene shows XCOM landing and takign on soem aliens in Canda.

Fuel tanker parked next to the farm, burning vehicle etc...you get the scenario

 

Minigun and grenade laucnhers instead of heavy and autocannons. Foudn an amrour that's close to Personal Armour for looks

 

Will do more renders of this showing various parts of it.

 

Folk like?

 

 

https://silverblade.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/xcom_assault.jpg

[Pete]

Cool! Give us more!!!

[Slaughter]

Very cool! Keep them coming, and do give us some close shots

[Silverblade-T-E]

More in pipleine just takes while to set up, render

 

Man-O-War? classic tunes!! (from signature)

[Solitaire]

More more more!

[Silverblade-T-E]

Continuing off from first image in the series:

 

The assault team closes in on the alien-infested farm.

The squads grenadier drops frag grenades to keep the murdering swines' heads down, or blown off...

As the riflemen rush in, the minigunner scythes down a fence the enemy may hide behind, blowing it to shreds, and one of the Grey-bastards is caught in the hailstorm of hot lead!

 

(PS I re-worked the original pic too)

First pic

 

https://silverblade.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/xcom_biggun.jpg

[Slaughter]

Looking neat! Those aliens better keep their heads down alright!

[Solitaire]

I want one of those guns...

[Silverblade-T-E]

Solitaire

 

Video on the net of soem lunatics with miniguns on a 4x4 and in their helicopters...omg...lol!

 

Armour was best I could get to look like XCOM armour: Personal Armour

[Jman4117]

AWESOME!

 

Maybe tone down the reflections on the armour and weapons a bit though, looks a bit like a target with all the glare coming off of it.

[Hobbes]

I want one of those guns...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Be sure to get a power suit also or the recoil will throw you backwards!

[Stun Grenade]

Very nice picture. Couldn't do the '-' in XCOM?

[Solitaire]

Very nice picture. Couldn't do the '-' in XCOM?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Neither can you, apparently

[NKF]

Originally it was just XCOM, so the dash matters not, for the dash only became official by TFTD and onwards.

 

I kind of prefer a dot myself (not a full stop).

 

I have a love hate relationship with 3d graphics. I'll tell you the hate bit because that makes for more interesting reading - the other bit is boooring.

 

Perhaps one of the elements that I like the least would have to be most 3d graphics just don't look right. They don't fit in. They seem rigid in a way. Too plasticy, shiny and I guess they stand out a lot. A little fuzz and a bit and less shine and a bit of grime, and the change is miraculous.

 

But that's not a critiscism on your work.

 

I recall I once did a Bryce animation for an end-term class project once. I cut a few corners by reducing the rendering window down and managed to render my animation in under 10 minutes (everyone else spent hours). The lack in quality resulted in a fuzzier image - but oddly enough, the fuzz and pixel artefacts actually made everything look a lot better. Don't ask me why. It just did. Heh. Made it into the top 10 as well - a little unexpected after I sat back and actually examined the animation only to see some serious flaws in it.

 

---

 

There is one thing in that composition that I think would add to the effect. The ejecting bullets. You want a spray of spent bullet cartridges flying about - the current ejecting bullets look more like a secondary ammo belt if you screw your eyes up and step back a bit. And I dare not think how painful it would be to get hit on the foot by those things! Ouch.

 

- NKF

[Slaughter]

Trust me NKF, you'd prefer getting a few of those on your foot as opposed to down your neck . When I was in the army, and we went to the firing range, I was hit by a few. They are hot in a bad way

 

And come to think of it, he does wear armour, so his feet should be safe.

[Silverblade-T-E]

As I told a pal who suggested the same thing: miniguns don't eject bullets sidewys like most guns. Similar to most *belt fed* machine guns they dump them out of the bottom far more neatly

 

I liked the shiny look on the armour as it's supposed to be a flexible metal, and a stainless steel minigun just looks "kewl" hehe.

[Jman4117]

but the vibrations from the gun would scatter the stream out a bit though..

[Pete]

They're well-trained circus bullets I tell ya!

[Silverblade-T-E]

although there maybe a bit of "femur extension here", I suggest folk try and make such art themselves before getting too critical...

 

It was a major PIA making the scenes, not helped by the fact the program is very buggy (only couple of months old and not even to 1.1 version yet), and the fact it has very high polygon/large textures in it, and I'm not I.L.M.

 

I could indeed have precisely modelled the spent shell casings, I have and use Rhino, a model maker used for industrial production. I could have thus made perfectly accurate 5.56mm shells, and put them in. I could also have individually positioned each casing to give a quasi-effect of vibration on firing.

However considering the program was crashing all the time as it was straining under the poly count/textures, and gets sluggish as hell (on a p4 3GHZ 2gig RAM system), I don't bloody think so.

 

Ahem, *evil grin, taps baseball bat meaningfully*

:>

 

Additonally, the time taken to throw out approximately 30 shells (about 28 visible in the falling stream) would be 1/2 a second...4,000 Rounds per minute....

[Bomb Bloke]

What about some code for the renderer to follow?

 

Not sure if you can do this with Rhino, but 3DMax lets you apply little mathematical formulas to the movement of objects. Make something move alone a sine wave, for example. A friend of mine used this to create a wavy effect of the base of some ghosts he made (pacman movie), but don't ask me how.

 

That way, no real need to position each and every shell. Let the software do it for you.

[NKF]

I know it's an absolute bugger to place lots of tiny objects in a 3d scene, especially in when the program is starting to fail! (the robot in my animation had no skeleton and I had to time and move all the moving parts in each frame -- the hands - oh the hands! Joint by joint! The inhumanity!).

 

But I think what's more important to us, the viewer, is the resulting perceived effect rather than having absolute perfection in the placement of every single small object and particle in the image. I guess you could probably get away with it by using less bullets - say half as many -- they are ejecting at great speed after all!

 

I'd have started with a line of bullets as well, but I'd probably randomly move the bullets a bit from view to view. That is to say, change to one view, move a few bullets at random, change the view, do it again, save, and again, and again until I end up with a real mess, forcing me to start over or give up and go and watch a movie or something.

 

 

- NKF

 

P. S: I like shiny barrelled miniguns too - mmm, chrome.

[Silverblade-T-E]

Vue does actually have ways to randomize things, in this case the Duplicate and Scatter tools, but as said the dern proggie really struggles with more than 1 Poser character currently :/

Seems to be a memory leak due to the large textures.

 

3 figures + armour figures (the armour is complex figures), plus rather than use simple metals the armour has texture in it = BIG load on the proggie :/ But gives better end effect on the armour.

 

 

Yah chrome miniguns look sweet

[Silverblade-T-E]

hard drive died, ugh only 4 month old system.

Anyway system running smoother and art proggie glitching less as a result, so tweaked the Minigunner pic.

 

Shell casings are a tad large: modelled to be 5.56 mm, but setting them into this is a total PIA (figured way to do that and use low resources though), end up like 7.62mms, but stuff it, not gonna change that if I can avoid it :>

Improved muzzle flash, bridge texture, added some trees, slightly different camera angle etc.

 

https://silverblade.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/xcom_minigun.jpg