Basic Tractor Mesh
After many hours of tedious work and a lot of learning, i finally managed to covert my original blocked out, messy construction vehicle in to a relatively detailed, low poly mesh. As my reference photos did not meet up perfectly, it made the centre piece very awkward to model but there were some rather useful benefits with it being located in the direct centre of the photos as it meant that the cabin overall had not been bent out of shape due to perspective, unlike the front and rear attachments which i was forced to use a lot of close-up photos to model correctly.
I'm quite happy with the relatively finished mesh at this stage but i made the mistake of following the reference photos too closely which turned out to display the wheels and scoop all at slightly different angles. This can quite easily be fixed though do to the near free-floating nature of the front wheels but for the scoop, i would have to tweak a lot of the front machinery which would make it rather difficult to judge against the reference images so this would be best done last, one i am entirely happy with the entire mesh and have fully optimised it.
Although the wheel and scoop high levels arn't too noticeable in the perspective view, they almost ruin the entire mesh with the side view which would lead to the model looking incredibly wonky and unusable within UDK. At this stage, i was only left with a few hundred Tris so i went through every single component, one by one to remove absolutely every piece of un-necessary geometry as some detail is still remaining from the roof. I managed to entirely forget the second hydraulic arm segment on the back tool piece whilst optimising which alone gave me an extra hundred Tris to work with, providing me with a fairly hefty budget.
With all of the details now done, i was able to reposition the wheels and tweak the vertexes around the scoop to level our the vehicle, meaning that the last few steps were to look for any 5 sided faces and then soften any curved edges due to the very organic feel of the curved machinery. I found a few errors with the rear drill piece but these were very easily fixed by bridging a few vertexes.
Softening the edges was a lot more awkward than i expected as i only wished to soften curves, not the attached faces but Maya decided to do this by default. To get around this issue, i decided to soften the entire vehicle and individually harden each flat face. This took an extremely long time to do but greatly helped me give each shape a nice, curved look, even in areas where it is lacking a lot of geometry such as the variety of hydraulic arms.
Front
Back
Side
Top
From start to finish, the mesh was a very awkward thing to create. I first attempted to create the entire thing as a solid shape but this just made the project quite confusing as i had to work around any edges i had already created, limiting what i could create drastically. After re-modelling it in much smaller segments and details, i was able to model each component directly from my reference photos before scaling and then placing them besides the correct components of the vehicle.
This did mean that i had to create a huge number of pieces but each one took far less time and was much more enjoyable/ easier to tweak. After separating each pieces, you can see exactly how much went in to just a simple tractor. This also allowed me to make some final checks on the geometry for some last minute optimisation before it was all good to go.
