Hey there,
For my challenge entry I’ve decided to leverage Sketchfab tools and reimagine
2.77 Racing Car splash screen as a looped animation of the car driving around the candy track.
The scene should run as smoothly as possible and load fast.
For that I’ve decided to avoid using textures and go with the vertex color approach:
Original splash screen by Pokestudio: https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/#painting
I’ll post more details as soon as I’ll have stuff to share.
Assembled a test using the splash screen file. I can already tell that the most challenging part would be to make the scene readable from a glance. Also might want to have multiple cameras, maybe a wide and a close-up shot.
For your Sketchfab scene, you could use annotations to set up multiple viewpoints:
Hey , how is your work going? Or life took over?)
Hi, thanks for asking
Definitely busy couple of weeks but I still intend to finish it in time for the deadline, so more updates soon!
A little update:
I simplified the track quite a bit to make it more readable. I think it will look better once other candy props will be in place. For the lighting we’ll have to see but I might just bake it altogether.
Another thing I’ve started doing is the character optimizations - the original vehicle has had around 4.5mil polys and there is no way something like this is going to Sketchfab untouched. So far I’ve reduced the polycount to around 700k and there is still a lot to tweak before I’ll proceed to rigging.
I think I’ll stop at around 40k but I lowkey want the scene to load instantly so maybe it’s worth it to try and over-optimize. We’ll have to see, but have a wheel comparison for now:
The character is around 40k now so I figured might as well try and import the rest of the scene into Sketchfab and have a first look. I think I’ll try to use vertex color wherever possible and limit myself to only a couple of textures.
Character update!
As a test I made the Root bone use a follow path constraint. Works like a charm!
Hey! As we’re entering the final days of the challenge, I’d like to give you some helpful tips to make sure you can successfully complete your entry. Please see my new post on the FAQ topic.
Okay now, after polishing up the environment and adding more props, finish up the animation and exporting everything together, I can call it done! Click the picture to go see the result
The final scene doesn’t use any textures and is only a single materials with vertex colors.
Sketchfab’s post processing does help a lot to less the candy-land aesthetic.
A couple of things I’ve encountered while working on this project:
Used geo nodes for 2 things in this project - to evenly space the candy struts under the race track and to scatter little nut shell pieces over the ice cream. Using Realize Instances at the end enables to convert the results to mesh for cleanup
For some reason latest Blender sometimes bakes AO as a pure black when baking to a color attribute. It’s kinda random so I couldn’t pinpoint the exact steps, but will probably make a bug report based on this file later
Vertex colors in Sketchfab are treated like a multiply tint on material’s base color. Because I used a single material my emission values for Bloom needed to also be included in vertex colors, so it took a bit of time to get only the things I wanted to glow glowing. Also a bit of emission in the material settings made the whole scene blend better with the background
Sketchfab viewer has this camera slide-in that as far as I understood is not configurable in it’s initial direction. I took that into account when placing background clouds to avoid camera colliding with them after the scene loads
I initially used Baked AO mode in Sketchfab for ground shadow, but if you have animated geo, then it’s not available. I tried using shadow catcher instead but it also gave me shadows under clouds, which I didn’t want. Instead I opted for making a ground plane myself and painting it in a color similar to the background
This looks really pretty in Sketchfab! I think you made the right choice getting a head of steam with Sketchfab stress-testing early to work out these last couple kinks.
Hey! Just a quick reminder that there’s now less than 12 hours remaining to wrap up your challenge entry - submissions close at 2022-09-15T21:59:00Z, GMT+1 (click on the link for some international times).
If you haven’t done so already, please review this post which contains some essential information for preparing your submission.
At the very least, upload your work to Sketchfab as soon as possible and add the #bcon22challenge tag.
It’s also a good idea to add a link to your WIP topic in the description of your Sketchfab model so we can easily find it.
I’ll also keep a close eye on the FAQ topic today, so if you have any issues or questions please post it there as soon as possible.
Good luck!
