https://www.artstation.com/artwork/A9YWN5
Today I’ve completed my first major portfolio piece.
It was all modelled, textured, baked and animated in Blender 2.8.
I also used Inkscape for some texturing work, especially anything involving precise shapes or text:
- Stickers
- Back window heating wire
- Missile control display
- Missile prints
- Car control panel
- Car floor mat (bump-map)
- Car’s white stripes
- License plate
- Gaffer tape pattern
- Stencils for painting technical slots and other details
I’ve focused most attention on the exterior parts, treating the interior as a less important part.
The stuff under the hood and inside the trunk is also less important.
I’d be glad to hear any comments and ideas on what could be done better.
My general process here was like this:
- Block out and sketch the initial model with simple shapes and annotations
- Complete a game-optimized lowpoly model with all the parts
- UV-unwrap every part or set of parts
- Create a highpoly version of each lowpoly part
- Create materials on the highpoly part
- Bake a PBR texture set onto the lowpoly part
I’ve tried to create as high-resolution textures as possible to maintain maximum detail. The main car body is using 8K textures. The missile is using 1K ones.
Majority of the materials were created using procedural techniques, combining Noise and Voronoi textures, texture paining, the AO and Bevel nodes and also stencil painting (slots on the back of the hood and on the sides of the doors).
Because I tried to bake everything directly from highpoly models to lowpoly ones - 32 GB of RAM sometimes was barely enough and it took a long time.
While texturing the car body - which was the biggest single chunk I processed - I’ve decided to change my workflow a bit. I’ve only baked Normals and AO from the highpoly model and created all the materials using that right on the lowpoly one. I would not be able to even paint anything on the highpoly model. I really can’t tell the difference, in quality, so I think this is just a way more optimized way of doing things. The car body material also forced me to start organizing my node trees properly.
First attempt has quickly diverged into a pile of spaghetti. I’ve re-made it from scratch by separating each component material into it’s own panel - each color-coded and labeled. I maintained a single vertical line of Mix Nodes that went from the top to the bottom. This allowed to create a very complex material, that was still easy to manage and extend.
The sub-materials were (in order of mixing from top to bottom):
- clean steel plate
- procedural rust mask
- rust
- car mirrors
- car paint mask
- car paint
- procedural rusty streaks (here’s a post about the technique I’ve used more or less)
- black plastic (for bumpers and car insides)
- panel spaces (using a stencil-painted mask to create separate panels and various slots on the car body)
- outer dirt mask (dirt on the outside parts of the car)
- inner dirt mask (dirt on the inside parts - ended up being too weak)
- procedural dirt
- floor mat (under the seats)
As you can see, this node tree was quite complex. But thanks to baking it right on the lowpoly model itself - it produced a set of 8K textures surprisingly fast. I was even able to bake two textures at once.
I’ve also learned that if Blender doesn’t want to bake your textures properly or crashes, it good to just copy and paste a part of the model into a fresh project and continue the work there. I ended up splitting a few parts this way. Undo also works much faster then.
Here’s a post about that problem.
In the end I’ve created the fire and smoke trail. The smoke trail was sculpted and baked from multires modifier, then textured procedurally. The sparks and fire was all painted on in Blender using a small graphic tablet.
I have never done anything this complex before - this was a huge challenge, and it took me 152 hours from the default cube to the finished model on Sketchfab. Not including all the time spent baking the textures.
I’d be glad to hear your thoughts, ideas for what I could have done better, how I could improve my workflow.
BTW: I am currently seeking employment in game development as a 3D artist.
