I asked a friend to pick a subject and he chose “war, particles”, so I made this small-ish I’ve liked for a while and added some really thick sand/dirt particles.
Wasn’t entirely sure about the textures but they turned out pretty cool, I also wasn’t sure about the amount of detail that I wanted (for example, I avoided every single bolt on the outside of the tank) because I’m torn between doing “realistic” proportions with “toon” textures or going full Stylized Mode which is pretty cool.
The modeling was pretty straight forward with some blueprints I found online, there are a bunch of them because they made several models of this particular tank.
For the textures I actually wanted to try an external software called ArmorPaint, similar to Substance, but given the amount of meshes it turned out way too complex for the program (and I was too lazy to make 1001 different groups), so I did the textures inside of Blender.
I wanted to rig the whole think so that the tracks/springs reacted to the floor and everything, but it felt like overkill. So I made a very simple animation to emulate the damping.
For the tracks I used an Array and Curve modifier, which then were parented to the main body to follow the movement.
For the ground I made a long bumpy ground and then booled (masked) out a cilinder area.
For the particles I used a Metaball with higher quality render settings and used it as the object.