The above shot is a really rough composition of the look I was trying to achieve. The helicopters are very early representations of what I was working on, comped on top of a background plate consisting of the sky and distant mountains. Following that was a few trees I added in then finally painted some rough grass in. The grass has been somewhat of a sticking point. I've tried using fur set up as grass and I just was not happy with the it turned out. I guess its ok though since I'm definitely not a Maya fur expert.
Now to the CH46 and this is where I absolutely went wrong. I love browsing the forum over at Military Meshes and there are some awe inspiring projects posted there. After seeing a few threads on super high res models I then got the bright idea to do the same.
So off I go, modeling every little detail I could see from panel lines to individual rivets. I'll have to admit this was way overkill for the end product I was wanting and something I definitely regret. A year later I am still not close to finishing this up at all. Dont get me wrong it is a awesome exercise in sub-D modeling, and using a few really cool animation functions in Maya to get my geometry but I really wish I left the panel lines and rivets to the texture map. I think my best route would have been to use some really nice super high res textures. Polycount really isn't an issue, even with the super high res model. My system has gone as high as 10 million tris on the screen with viewport lag starting to rear its head but as a static object in one or two renders, it was doable. Its just a huge huge time sink. So my hats off to any of those guys that have finished those super detailed models. Maybe one day I'll get around to finishing this up.
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