The Plan news - Seregruth´s Land Raider Variants mod for Dawn of War

Introduction

Greetings, WH40k fan! You probably just opened my first official mod for Dawn of War and you might be now asking yourself "why would anyone want to add a vehicle, which is already ingame like from the very beginning...?!"
Well this question is certainly adequate, although only to a certain point. Yes - the Land Raider was even in the vanilla game without any expansions; and yes - many of his variants are already featured in some mods; but no - not all of them are...high-quality (in terms of canonical appearance). At least not as I would like them to be...
And what do you do if you´re not happy about something you love? You change it, right?! ;)

Typification of the mod

I didn´t introduce myself yet - I´m the chief modeller of Yuuzhan Von faction for an EaW:FoC mod called Yuuzhan Vong at War. So I´m capable of making 3D models, some basic textures and I actually know how to work with Corsix ModStudio (just the basics). But getting a 3D meshe ingame is unfortunately beyond my skills...
Therefore I´m not certain about the "release form" of this mod. But it probably won´t end as a full mod adding all these guys ingame. Instead of this, I would like to cooperate with mods editing Space Marines and so contribute to quality of these mods. So my first question: should I release A) only the 3D models+textures; B) almost game ready models (edited in OE)+team colorable textures; C) get them ingame myself and release it as an unbalanced in favour of one faction mini-mod; or D) the 3D models first, then work on OE and then maybe the mod itself?

Planned content

As I mentioned before, it´s pretty probable, that you´ve seen these variants in a mod. But they were too rushed or not "made with the love they deserve"... :D
/warning: this section might be offensive against certain mods/
Here are my children:
Land Raider Ares - this siege beast can be seen in at least 2 mods but both of them just took the Demolisher Cannon with the Siege Shield and added it to the existing model with no really high accuracy. It also lacked the reinforced armour, which should (not according to Codex) be mandatory on this type of unit...
Land Raider Achilles - a relatively fresh addition of ForgeWorld into LR ranks. This relic of pre-heresy era has a very distinctive appearance and weaponry.
Land Raider Terminus Ultra - it´s a shame that I´ve seen this variant only in a single mod and unfortunately not in the one, which could make use of the apocalyptic anti-super-heavy role...
Land Raider MkIIb - the final official variant should be this predecessor of the known MkIII Phobos variant and I should point out that !it has not been seen in a mod yet!
I also intend to add an unofficial variant - not much has been decided yet... Only that it will be rather a battletank than a transport (which loose much of their potential in the DoW engine) with a hull-mounted twin-linked avenger mega bolter. This relates to my second question: what should I use for the sponsons? (I´m thinking about something like quad autocannons to make it believably OP =D )

Contributors

I´m aware of my limits and therefore I know, that I cannot do this project entirely my own...
So here I would like to mention the ones helping me to achieve a final stage (what is the final stage actually?):
-a fellow denizen of Czech Republic, my friend knezekj. Make sure to check work of this guy! This man is sort of responsible for achieving (or failing to achieve) the second stage of release.
-my brother Enpremi who will be the one making great textures for this mod. You can find his work here, on skyrim.nexus and on Verold
-crediting others will be far more difficult... In order to save my brother´s time I try to kitbash as much as possible. Therefore I´m using stuff from other mods, mainly DarkProphecy. But _Ironheart_ is also using kitbash very often and finding creators of pieces he used for kitbashing which I later used for kitbashing can be...at least difficult :(

And how could you contribute to see these LR ingame? Well, I´m always open to new ideas so suggestions are surely a possible way.
If you´re familiar with coding models than make sure to contact me, since knezekj has his own mod (and many others things to do) so he can´t do it all the time...
I´m certainly looking for someone, who knows how to make textures colourable, how to add badges and stuff like that to them!
And finally if you want to have one of these machines in YOUR favourite mod, you have to develop some pressure on the mod creators. I´ll try to make the implementation of them as easy as possible. In the end, it´s always great to see your work in the most precise mods ;)

So that´s for the beginning, I´ll upload renders and you make sure to leave a comment!

Regards, Seregruth