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more on the vehicles of xcom

one assault craft (terminator HK)
two antigrave Heavy weapon platforms (gau-8's on Tron chassis)
Two plasma tracked HWP's flanking a carbon fiber and dark city camo Anetocis workshop warthog.
One Hummer in city camo led by 3 medium drones (one pulse rifle, one advanced sensor, and one Psi Jammer/Network)
And a laser cannon HWP in the front.

Ill likley only use a handfull of these in the game.
I also need to take much closer pictures of the HK and warthog and tron vehicles since their paintjobs are very hard to see at just one angle.
I really like the carbon fiber effect on the warthog but its probably going to be as hard to photograph as the wraithlord.




and

Stunningly brilliant work, atropos! Against the background, these vehicles look like you travelled into the future and took a picture (they have a very realistic appearance). Thanks for sharing!

Thats.... pretty amazing.

Wow. How on earth did you do the digital camo? Ive been racking my brains for ages trying to think of a convenient way to mask for that.

These last few pics really just look amazing, they don't look like miniatures at all, or they look like there is some Photoshoppery at work. Very impressive. I am not so keen on paper scenery but I can't deny it looks good here.

Bruticus wrote:These last few pics really just look amazing, they don't look like miniatures at all, or they look like there is some Photoshoppery at work. Very impressive. I am not so keen on paper scenery but I can't deny it looks good here.

I used to agree about papercraft terrain but I realized I didnt like them due to style or flimsiness. What I did with these is reinforce them with multiple layers, or use them as wallpaper to glue to foamboard so they are more robust. With some I just took raw images and made the images tileable like with the oil containers, then just wrapped cardboard babyformula tins. Those are robust and great to throw ever decreasing sized hollow terrain into. Papercraft tiled terrain packs so nicely and weighs nothing. But, some pieces just have to be 3d models hand painted to get the right effect. I just prefer to spend my time painting minis rather than terrain. (read: kids are time sinks=)

Vitruvian XVII wrote:Wow. How on earth did you do the digital camo? Ive been racking my brains for ages trying to think of a convenient way to mask for that.

Digital camo is very easy. Take a sheet of paper, cut a square out of one edge, cut a bunch of smaller squares randomly out of that, cut one or two more smaller squares out of that, Go to the next edge, repeat. repeat for all 4 edges of a sheet of paper. After an hour you have one of the most useful and awesome digital camo stencils, you just have to remember never to spray all the way up to the outer perimeter of the paper so you can still tile your patterns by enclosing areas.

Then in the middle of the sheet of paper cut out a few random square cets for the accents or fine detail squares. See , its quite easy and just takes a tinny bit of skill with an airbrush.

Wow that sounds easy! Im having trouble visualising it, and how you would go about using it though, any chance you could take a pic of the stencil?

Here are some nicer shots of some of those models.
The carbon fiber warthog , as usual, is very hard to get good pictures of, so that will be later.

a paramilitary or reservist hummer in city digicamo, and 3 scout drones (scout, shotgun/pulse rifle, and Psi-jammer)



Then some heavy weapon platforms of various tech levels


Amd the HK modifed to be an assault craft for Xcom but using alien hull fragments grafted to the armor.



And finally the gray army with two of their HWP terror saucers, one enormous Psi amp, or shield generator, one cyborg stealth suit (left) and two gray's in power armor (right)

The grays are from zombiesmith. probably the BEST grays with attitude ive seen in a long time. I love these guys.

Ok, now for two of my favorites.

I just finished painting one of antenociti warthogs as an advanced assault vehicle for Xcom troops. One of the workhorses of the minutemen response teams, this boasts an alien organic fibrous armor interleaved with a carbon fiber support for superior plasma dissipation and EM absorption. The top panels are a cheaper metal painted with a basic camo to blend in to streats a little better for overhead observers. This vehicle boasts little in firepower, mainly a single pulse chamber, as its main purpose is to deliver a response tactial team as fast as humanly possible. For the paint job I went with a carbon fiber technique ive been playing with that uses about 5 layers to try to get a more irridescent and refractory effect. As always, whenver I try these glossy outcomes that are angle dependent, pictures are a royal pain. but I think these two sets came out nicely. airbrushed.

it was painting this guy that made me decide I needed to model and make my own additional civilian and paramilitary vehicles







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and FINALLY, after over a year of not knowing quite how to paint him, I decided to include him in with the last vehicle for carbon fiber armor.
This XV9 commander R'Alai was painted with CF since its supposed to be the most advanced stealth suit the tau have. I was going to paint a stealth field transition on him but my wife wisely told me to stop because he was so busy already.
You may have noticed in some of the x-com warmat pictures that there were laser fences, or forcefield fences. These were practice to get the forcefield effect just right for this model. I dont know how much time I soaked into this guy. We shall see how much I eventually put into his friends. Model is 100% airbrushed as are shields, a bit of drybrushing to finish the base.. sorry.

And, once again getting a good picture of a shiny refractory carbon fiber effect is rough, add to that lights in recesses that have to be directly illuminated, without creating horrid reflections..... and now add to that shields that prefer to be lightly foreground lit and heavyily background lit.... well lets just say I had a lot of lights on this sucker to even get these pictures which are still a little washed out from the reflections. But I think this is about as good as a single light scheme can get for pictures of this model.

I wanted this model to give you a feeling that this guy can take a shrug off some pretty harsh punnishment with the two obligatory shield drones, and the integral shield.

Cant equate into words how awesome that suit is. RIDICULOUS!

I am so stealing the force field idea for some of my AdMech stuff, would work great to represent void shields on titans and stuff.

Are the drones removable?

That's just... I tend to lurk here because I find it hard to do anything other than gush (whereas I prefer to comment constructively!) but... yeah. That's the canine's cojones. The hexagon effect is perfection itself.

As ive had a several pm's on the topic...

1. the masking of the hexagons was done with some commercial masks, and with two hand cut masks. Print out hexagons and cut with a knife.
2. the shields are done using transparent plastic, some already in spherical form cut then painted very carefully and gently in just the right order. Order of operations for paints is very important for the lighting to really make the shield pop. You can deform plastic using a hot ari gun
3 Im willing to paint these on comission, cost is 10-12usd for the first one (2"-6" diameter) then 8-10 for each additional. I also do rectangular shields such as what I used for the laser fence in the xom game for the same cost for a 3-4" by 8-11" rectangle. They may have more area but are a little easier to paint than the spherical shields.

Pm me if interested or go make your own and post pictures!

Bloody brilliant paint work and the X-com project is phenominal!

Been a while
Ive been working on sci-fi vehicles potentially for a kickstarter but pushed this commission through =)

Trazyne the infinite


DoomScythe


NightScythe

Lovely, just lovely. Very odd positioning of the big gun on the Doom Scythe though.

Amazing airbrushing! Really looks great on the scythe.

I miss you works. It's a pleasure to see you back on Dakka.

 MeatShield wrote:
I miss you works. It's a pleasure to see you back on Dakka.

=) Thanks. I dont go anywhere, I just lurk until I have a new pretty to show. Right now a lot of my time is going into my line of sci-fi vehicles. Eventually Ill have pictures of them all up in this blog.

And for those following my (may one day be a kickstarter and is now just an expensive casting hobby) I have a train on order =) Thanks to Mr Cross for the Doomscythe commission as that paid for the train prototype!

Ok Finally got around to painting some farscape models.
The moya is from someone off of ebay. Its not the greatest of models since he put some strange string over the model rather than actualy model detail into it. However, I found a way to work with the funny string. And I wanted a Talyn to go with it so I modeled something that looks a bit like talyn.

I also painted the base, I hope, to look like a starburst in progress from the rear. The base for talyn was painted to look like one of the most common pictures found of talyn on the net.

It is, as with all of your work, stunning. My only criticism might be that the background is so busy that it serves to distract from your paintjob.

I finally found where I got these tiles that I used on the following map
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/downloadAttach/121122.page
You can find his tiles at this location.
http://toposolitario.es/workshop/tableros.html
Credit where credit is due, Awesome tiles!

Among other things ive been working on, I threw this in to get it done by Christmas.
It is my interpretation of Harry Dresden's Post war Cadillac Hearse, his "company car" as the Winter Knight.

Merry Christmas!

It was a Hotwheels '59 cadillac dragster. I believe. 3.5" long.

Merry Christmas Atropos! Nice work on that car.

Wow. Queen Mab would be proud!

I finally got a hold of Toposolitario and got his permission to post this for free.
Its an 80MB map half with his work, the tileable map, and part is mine with the helicopter dock and the grass field.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?5lzj9q56qwtpq97

I recommend printing it on a vinyl banner, Matte finish. 4' by 8'

That's awesome, Atropos. You two have both done a fantastic job. Thanks for sharing that and thanks to Toposolitario!

Pls Master make a flame tutorial i wold sell my soul to learn how to paint flames properly

 lupo1982 wrote:
Pls Master make a flame tutorial i wold sell my soul to learn how to paint flames properly

Dont do that, flames are easy... mind numbingly so. I was getting a little nauseated doing these flames since Ive "flamed out" hehe. Go to youtube, or airbrush tricks and search for real fire or realistic flames and airbrush. Follow what they do, only smaller! If you want to see tinny flames look at my thunderbolt or star fury. Its barely an inch wide and has better flames than this one.

1 Paint base color
2 Paint white streaks
3 Flesh out the streaks with stencils
4 Color gradients into the streaks
repeat 3 and 4 as necessary to add sufficient depth while shifting your color about the color wheel, as your desired flames dictate. Dont go more than 1/4 around the wheel except for the faintist touch at the extreme ends.

5 Take pictures and share your results!

Ok
Just got some nice ME ships from studio bergstrom and this is the first ive finished. I painted the base to look like the system the omega relay sends you to at the galactic core. This model is about 5" long.

Exquisite. I especially like the subtle shading/pattern on the hull.