"Originally, the Apex series robots were designed to replace workers in dangerous environments. After automation took over the planetary system, the algorithm decided that regions where we populated were considered dangerous environments and the algorithm gave its constructs the tools of destruction to destroy us, not build us a future.
These things, will absolutely not stop, until we all eradicated."
You can see more renders, and some gifs of the Apex Terminator here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OyYoxJ
Although I could post this in the What are you working on currently thread, I didn’t want this getting lost in that thread, and I wanted to go over some parts regarding its design. First and foremost, I have @JohnDrinkin to thank w/ helping me design the Apex Terminator…
This project started around January this year for an unofficially titled project called “Project Blu” , which I won’t go into much detail about other then its a game with a very specific style and theme in mind that is extremely uncommon on Roblox. Originally around Janurary I was thinking of going with a blocky version of the T-800 Terminator, but really didn’t like the what I was envisioning, and liked it even less in 3D.
So I pushed the character model aside for a bit while working on commissions and coding the game. In September an idea came to me shortly after posting my Protogen inspired model on twitter: https://twitter.com/GuestCapone/status/1171121857086595073
This, this had the head shape I liked. It looked robotic, and organic but also incredibly simple. I played around a bit on my own trying to figure out a body for this thing, before my friend JohnDrinkin offered to draw some sketches of for the Protogen’s body – However there’s one thing you should know, we’re not calling this a Protogen after this point because one of the main things about the fictional Protogen species is that they are in fact mostly organic with mechanical parts. The Apex has no organic parts at all, it is all mechanical and synthetic. Because of this (and IP reasons) we’ve agreed to drop the name “Protogen” from the model’s identity entirely and go with Apexgen, which is suitable considering the definition of “Apex” basically means peak performance, which you can only have through automation and materials that don’t wear away like organic material does… and As for the “gen” at the end, gen just sounded better then leaving it with “Apex”. With that out of the way-- , with one major requirement. The design must be robotic. No organic parts and needs to loosely fit a Robloxians proportions, this is what John came up with:
(second image is a little bit later into the modeling process, but was to show some different tail ideas)
Earliest picture I have in production:
Adding in some pistons:
Finished mesh and test render to see how it all looked before exporting to Roblox, originally was not going to texture the model…
At this point I was about to leave it here and call it done, until…
Roblox dropped the big one…
I had to do it, I had to go all out on this model. I had, to finally show to mostly myself the community what I can do, when given the signal to go all out. I looked at the model one last time and began to decide what colors I wanted and what details I wanted and where to put them, before unwrapping the model. Baked bevels for an extra layer of detail, and exported the model + baked normal map inside of Blender to Substance Painter and began working on the textures. Now I was a bit lazy for doing this, but because I now have the intention to render this model before exporting it to Roblox, I went ahead and put the Legs, Arms, Head, Torso and Tail on their own respective texture sets. (A texture set refers to a set images that contains all of the textures needed for that model, aka the Diffuse, Spec, Rough, Metalness, Height and Normal textures)
My workflow for painting is as follows:
1.) Layout main colors of the model first.
2.) Set the base material(s) roughness and spectacular second.
3.) Tweak colors if needed.
4.) Add in extra details color details such as edge wear or scratches.
5.) Add in extra normal/height details such as edges, seams, screws, joints and so on.
With that in mind I had the following results in only 4 hours of texturing:
The majority of details you see here, came from various Alpha brush/stencil packs I purchased on ArtStation before converting their bitmaps to normal maps via Substance Painters Height To Normal filter:
Which allows for you to paint normal details onto your normal map to help add depth to your models. With that in mind, I played around for a few more hours until I got things where I liked it. Imported the textures into Blender and found out I had set the materials roughness too low, resulting basically in a mirror for all of my metal rather then a powder coating finish to the metal which I wanted it to have. Fixed that, reimported and looked at my model. Realizing it was missing some details and had too many in some areas. Not enough color in some areas and looking too boring, and the faceplate was too busy for the render. So I removed the cracks, changed some coloring in places and added in a few decals on the neck, chest, back and hips just to make it look more like the robot existed in some universe. After that, I exported the textures once again, set up a simple HDRI lighting setup with a deep red rimight and rendered it:
Looked good, but was lacking something important. What was it I wondered? Ah yes, a gun. I spent a day on looking for what gun to give him, it needed to be futuristic and reminiscent of the Terminator, I had almost given him an UZI with a CRT scope, until I decided to take break, watch the Terminator on Netflix and saw my answer in the opening. The rifle the T-800 was holding, the plasma rifle. After doing a quick google, I had found the reference needed and modeled and textured it. Since this is mostly going to be covered up by the character I didn’t really do much for the material or color work. A simple normal map and diffuse texture was enough.
After that one last, important detail was missing for the render. The environment. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on making something that wasn’t meant to be the focus of the render, and I also was really excited and wanted to post this project ASAP, but wanted to make sure my presentation of it was amazing the first time anyone saw it. With that in mind,I decided I wanted to do a simple floor texture only, so that the model isn’t just “floating” there in the world. With that in mind I began modeling a simple-ish hardsurface industrial looking floor using assets from my Blender-to-Roblox-level project, I don’t have a picture of this part of the production as I was in a call w/ @Ellzd and screensharing, however I baked the model to a single plane which would serve as the base for my floor texture. I then went into substance painter and began manually masking out the individual floor panels before coloring and applying materials and details to them as needed, and slapping the decal on top that the Apexgen would be standing in the middle of. After 9 hours of texturing, I had something pretty:
Now, my scene is complete, all I had left to do was rig, perfect lighting and render.One of the most challenging parts of rigging was getting the pistons to actually function like pistons;
which was easier to do then I thought, just took a while to figure out. After that, I had to animate a simple walk cycle, which would both help show that the model can be animated, and help w/ posing the model in a static image;
If you have any questions for how I did something/what did I use to make this, ask away. And if you like the model a lot and want to see more then give me a follow on Twitter @GuestCapone !
, have you got disc? or any other means of communicating?