Sci-Fi Military Vehicle Assignment

As with every assignment, research is key, and so I began this with doing research on existing Sci-Fi vehicles. However this brief requires the design to look like it would be believable created in the next 100 years, so anything that would involve extreme fictional themes would have to be ruled out:

http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sci-fi-space-transport-ship/831002 (15/03/16)
http://conceptships.blogspot.co.uk/2013_02_01_archive.html (15/03/16)
http://digital-art-gallery.com/picture/4384 (15/03/16)
http://digital-art-gallery.com/picture/gallery/spaceship (15/03/16)
http://vladgheneli.deviantart.com/art/Sci-fi-Ship-448725598 (15/03/16)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268402/Flying-car-developer-says-hes-80-million-closer-making-sci-fi-dream-reality.html (15/03/16)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?348409-Sci-fi-Concept-Vehicle (16/03/16)
http://jcobes.deviantart.com/art/Sci-Fi-Vehicle-3D-Render-ATSV-Savage-419482364 (16/03/16)
http://whatzitoya.deviantart.com/art/Sci-fi-Transportation-Vehicles-353371122 (16/03/16)

After I made this moodboard, I watched the film Elysium for inspiration on Sci-Fi vehicles. The reason this film was chosen in particular is it is set in roughly the next 100 years, as well as having been conceptualised as a believable science-fiction film. Below are some concepts from the film that stood out to me:

http://www.artofben.com/ELYSIUM (16/03/16)
http://skul4aface.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/elysium-artwork.html (16/03/16)
http://cargocollective.com/christianpearce/Elysium (16/03/16)

Since Elysium based it's concept on real world assets I feel it would be sensible to do the same and also do a moodboard for military vehicles to establish a theme and look into similarityies to carry over into my design:

http://www.aishtechnologies.com/products/military-vehicle-components (16/03/16)
http://www.copybook.com/military/companies/goodwolfe-energy/articles/goodwolfe-supply-mission-batteries-for-military-vehicles (16/03/16)
http://www.army-technology.com/projects/tmv6x6/ (16/03/16)
https://wall.alphacoders.com/by_sub_category.php?id=57255 (16/03/16)
http://www.extremewest.co.uk/military-vehicle-driving-experience/ (16/03/16)
http://militarygearr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/military-vehicles.html (16/03/16)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2275172/Britain-leave-3-000-military-vehicles-worth-2BILLION-frontline-pulls-Afghanistan.html (16/03/16)
https://www.armourgeddon.co.uk/military-vehicle-driving.html (16/03/16)
http://www.military-vehicle-photos.com/picture/number3821.asp (16/03/16)

From these I produced a couple of sketches of hovering/flying vehicles:

Out of these I decided to create a 3D model of the first drawing (top of page 1) in Maya 2016, and then lit it:

 

 No lighting

 Top angle with basic lighting

Lower angle with night lighting

Although the lower angle shows a less clear form the lighting makes it look more interesting. Despite this it would be easier to do a paintover with the top angle using the below textures. I also tried different colours and designs:

http://veryshareimg.com/free-seamless-metal-textures.html (30/03/16)
http://seamless-pixels.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/free-seamless-metal-textures_28.html (30/03/16)

I feel that my favourite variation is the dark blue one, as not only did I experiment with overlaying text but I feel that it's a more interesting concept, although strictly speaking it would be a "Police" vehicle and not a "Military" one. So in conclusion the variation I would choose is the green one. I felt that paintingover was rather difficult despite trying it before, although it was quicker there are some areas which are rough around the edges. In the future I could look into tips on the paintover technique.

With background added 

https://www.pexels.com/search/landscape/ (30/03/16)