Sci-fi Vehicle pt 2 (not FMP)

The Extraterrestrial Surveyance vehicle is now finished. Operating on a frozen planet, it melts with its laser through ice to survey minerals beneath the surface, before flying on to the next site.

Render of vehicle and environment taken in 3ds max using Xoliul Shader 1.6. Snow effect added in Photoshop.

To save time, I did not add any high poly details, only chamfering the hard edges to create the normal map. Instead, I used nDo 2 to add panels, grooves and similar details.

After finishing the normal map, I used several different bakes including ambient occlusion (top-down and even), curvature (model-level and texture-level), world height to add a subtle gradient and world normal to add an upward bias to the lighting. This meant I was starting from an already very finished and consistent-looking texture. From here it was a simple matter of adding grunge (for which I used the curvature map to help) and other texture details.

For a bit of fun, I did a little animation and rendered it out as a video.

Here's the final model. This previewer hasn't quite got the speculars right, so it appears more like a black matte than the silver metal in the video/screens. (WebGL required)