BB-8 (not the first, def not the last I'm sure :) )

First time i’ve tried to properly uv unwrap and create proper textures, modelled, comp and rendered in blender tone mapped in photomatrix, I used substance painter to create the sand and paint bb-8 first time I’ve used it, really like it.

All quads and sub surfable if that is a word :slight_smile: First bit of work I’ve done I’m happy to call finished, well as much as it ever will be, hopefully I’ve not missed something stupid!



Good unii in the project

How did you find working between Substance Painter and Blender? It’s a combination I’m thinking of trying.

Very good job! How did you set up your PBR shader?

It really has been very good, congratulations!

Hiya,

The latest version of substance painter and the latest version of blender work great together, you can now bake all the maps direct in substance painter as well so no messing about getting that sorted and it’s really easy.

I ended up with a workflow as follows that works well.

Model and uv unwrap in blender, create high and low res mesh if required, use vertex paint to colour the final mesh where you might want masks for painting, make sure you have just one material per object you are exporting, this will get imported as the mesh set name.

Export from blender as FBX this maintains all the vertex colour information.

In substance painter import the FBX file, for each mesh set bake all the maps you want, it’s really quick and easy and they get auto allocated to the mesh, you can add a separate high res mesh for baking at this point if you like. The ID map is the one that bakes out all the vertex colours.

Get painting, use the id map for quick masking (you can mask by UV, mesh etc in there as well as required but I found vertex painting it first was really quick and easy)

Once finished export the channels as maps, create a material in blender to use them, you can also export stuff like the curvature map, thickness etc. and use those to create dynamic materials, dynamic edge ware etc in blender.

I’d never bother baking maps in blender now substance painter is so quick and easy, it also means like for the sand I worked at 2k so it was quick and then at the end quickly re-baked everything at 4k and set the doc size to 4k and substance painter recalculates all the strokes and you get proper 4k maps not just uprezzed (unless you have uses actual textures of cause that are too small instead of dynamic materials)

It’s one of the few program’s i’ve used recently that has an initial easy learning curve and is genuinely fun to use, I did try it last year with blender and didn’t get on with it was a lot of fiddling about with maps etc but now it’s so easy just hit the bake button and go :slight_smile:

Hope that’s useful!

Mark

I just kept it really simple, I was going to be a bit more flashy but when I looked at the render I thought actually that looks fine I’m not going to bother, it’s the normal and roughness maps that make it I think, usually I’d be trying to dynamically simulate that in blender but as it’s all baked in I didn’t need to. The emission node set I didn’t end up using had each light as a separate material in blender so I could control then but for the initial render I just used multiply to quickly blow out the colour detail so I had a black and white mask and used the emission mask I had generated (you can add an emission channel in substance painter now so you can get an idea or what it looks like as you are painting)

See below, this is all I did, nothing fancy, I could have brought in the curve maps etc as well but it looks fine to me so didn’t bother!


Thanks Leon!

great news about using them together as I am just starting with Substance Painter and was hoping it would work well with Blender!

I have a program on my old comp called deep paint 3D that was basically the same idea as substance painter, but it was buggy and they never developed it. I like the stuff I have seen from substance painter, and I think I will get a copy.

awesome work! very timely too :wink:

Thats amazing. How would one go about learning how to do a mesh like that?

I’m a beginner and I’ve made a very simplistic BB-8 with just the simple meshes (spheres and so on). I would really like to learn how to make meshes like those, but have no idea where to start. Is there a name or something for that so I can google it and start learning?
Because one day I will be as good as you are!

The robot looks great, but the sand and background look fake. How about using Microdisplacement to add a believable desert?

Looks really good, would love to see him in some different environments, like a Snowplanet or something.

He’s great!! :smiley: I, too, am not mad on the sand…the formations look bit regular maybe? Why not bring the horizon line down, fade the ground out too the distance more; and maybe just keep the foreground ground/sand more simple flattish with few bumps here and there, but yeah the micro/fine displacement to make some super nice focused grainy sand…
But, as said, he’s brilliant!- good job.

wow… thats amazing

hard surface modeling, but note theres subivision added ( who recalculate the mesh position hence why it look so constant )

for this type of things, its better to use roundcube instead of sphere when starting i think.

Yeah I understand it is hard surface modeling. I was wondering more about how to make the patterns on the sphere and stuff. Because all I have really done so far is modelling with simple meshes, and I don’t really know how to learn how to do those complex meshes with different shapes in it and so forth.

Thanks for the answer though!

Hi Kablash,

what I did for this one is get a cube subdivide it loads and make it a proper sphere using to sphere in mesh editing, this is the base that will be discarded later.

then use shrink wrap to that and draw on the base panels with verts, keep them quads etc. use array modifiers to replicate around the sphere. cut out shapes with boolean tools (but watch to clear up stray verts etc you really have to think out the topology so it subdivides nicely, try to stick with quads in the main unless your using triangles to specifically to terminate edge flow etc.

once you are happy apply the shrink wrap and use the thickness modifier or just extrude out to get the depth

lots of sub surf as its a curve so spend time getting the edge loops nice or you’ll get pinches in the mesh.

It took me a while to get started but once I had a feel for it it was not that hard.

use loop tools and smooth to relax the verts when you have the shrink wrap applied to make them all space out nice like that.

hope that helps! getting the edge loops sorted is the main challenge for the sharp corners, using crease etc. on the curved surface never looks that good to my eye but depends on how close you are going to be to it.

hope that helps!

mark