Hrumph, I guess I am losing my google search skills. I have just wasted 6 hours over the past 3 days looking for good reference pictures or models of the 2005 style War of the Worlds tripod. Frustrating.

Anybody got a decent set of top, bottom, and side views of one of these darlings, or better yet, a 3ds model that I can butcher up? Mine isn't too bad, but it's based on a single shot, and I'm sure it won't get great crits. Spielberg has nothing to worry about (yet).


Tripod1 - Very much a WIP.

Cheers!
Mark

Well, I guess nobody has any good images of these. Wonder why they are so hard to come by. So, here is my effort so far. Skinned it for now with an old space ship skin that I have kicking around. Not movie accurate, by any means, but a fair representation considering the materials available...

Man, animating a 3 legged walking machine is a royal pain.



Well, off to do a bit of level design.

Mark

Google, i found this first image.


http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=war%20of%20the%20worlds&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi

and

http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&q=war+of+the+worlds+tripod&revid=675456281&sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=2

you might want to look into reducing the poly count in the legs a bit since they are adding a lot of polys to it but not a lot of detail/silhouette.

Well if you really want to do sort of a copy of that movie's tripod design the legs are way too short. You can find some more pics here (although I can't remember how far they actually really were shown in the movie as there were either close-ups or it was night or something else):

http://www.moviesonline.ca/movie_gallery.php?id=4797

Here you'll find a good design sketch from the side:
http://waroftheworlds.wikia.com/wiki/Tripod

Here you'll also find a good screenshot from the movie where you actually can see a bit of one walker:
http://www.theblackvault.com/wiki/index.php/Tripod_(The_War_of_the_Worlds)

EDIT:
Oh - have a look at this model:
http://sketchup.google.de/3dwarehouse/details?mid=9032f086544af1c7200aa0cf8d41daac

Enjoy your meal
Toast

By the looks of it you didnt try very hard, did you even google war of the worlds?

Yeah, as I said, I went through over 6 hours of Google searches. This is probably one of the better pics, but it is an "artist's impression (look at the legs) and isn't something that I can model from. Like all the others out there, it's an FX shot. The lighting and the glows seem to be intent on hiding or distorting the shape of the craft. The one in the foreground appears to have a different shape than the one in the background. Pretty much any other craft or vehicle has blueprints, top, side, rear and bottom views that clearly show how the item was built. I guess that's why there aren't any 3d models of this craft. Oh well, I will just keep tweaking mine until I'm statisfied. Thanks for looking, Blade. Your second search produced a couple of new ones, including a side view I hadn't seen before.

Cheers!
Mark

Ah, yeah, whatever Blade. And your mother wears army boots.
Seriously, if you have nothing useful to add, why bother?

Mark

You might be right, the legs might be short, I think I need a person or other object in there for scale.



That's the one that I hadn't seen before.



Yeah, that was where I got the general shape from. These damn shots are always so obscured. There's either too much fog, crappy lighting, or total bloody darkness. Guess those are the challenges.



Sketchup. Know of a converter for SKP to 3DS or X?

Cheers!
Mark

You're right, they do account for a lot of polys. I just deleted everything except one leg, foot and ball joint that meets the body. 146 polys. That's about 400 for all 3. I originally had just extruded cubes at about half the poly-count, but replaced them with cylinders, as this is what a player in-game would see first and most often. Figured I'd use the cubed legs in a LOD model. Might re-think that. Maybe cube the top portions of the legs.

Cheers!
Mark

EDIT: Compromised and replaced the top and middle portions of the legs only, since they shouldn't get a lot of view, and cubed them, and saved about 130 polys. The lowest part of the legs are still cylindrical to avoid the blocky look when planted motionless. Good call, LostClimate. I like an optimized model. They might look high-poly because the skin makes them look segmented, but in reality, each leg has only 8 sections, 4 of which are joints to avoid skin stretching when animating. I also stretched the legs to twice and a half the original length. Time to add a few dangling tentacles. If memory serves correctly, they looked a lot like squid tentacles. Round and tapered, then flairing out into a flat diamond shape...

Thanks for the help guys.
Mark