I’m making a scene that requires a fair amount of trash lying around on the floor and off of objects, and perhaps some kind of rubble or rocks. I want the scene to handle some reasonably close up renders so I don’t want it to look too crappy, but also obviously I don’t want a million verts for trash, there are quite a few other more important objects in the scene.
I guess I would like to know not only how you guys would go about the modeling (hand modeling each piece? I want the trash to be varied, but not necessarily determinable as particular objects, more fragments of objects) but also the general philosophy of making and laying trash in a scene. It’s something that I think can make or break a good scene, but also isn’t the main focus.
There is quite a few ways I would handle it but it would depend on the scale of the scene on the method I would use. One way I would do it is model a few random pieces of trash, like bags of various types, chunks of random pieces making sure to keep them low poly enough for a hair particle system to emit them in the scene and vertex paint the locations in weight paint that I want the trash bits to me strewn about. Another way would be to use a rigid body and actually drop the pieces of trash onto the scene in areas that the trash would be located. Then there is always the manual placement method that if doing without image references tends to always look not so random.
You could even go as far as making the pieces of trash in high detail then baking them to a low poly version to keep the vert count low but detail high, which would also allow you to have the pieces closer to the camera to be used for true detail and not faked detail.
Do you think he’s doing bakes for these objects? On a specific note, the jagged ends of the wood pieces I really like, the breaks and cracks in the plastics…
He did use substance designer. But I am also sure there is probably an addon that would help with creating a layered look but I haven’t personally done anything that covered in trash and debris like that. Something on that scale where everything is up close and personal I would imagine there was baking for quite a bit of the objects though. Some of the planks of broken wood do look similar just at a different angle which makes them at first glance look like a different piece. But if he works at Blizzard as an environment artist I am quite sure that scene is rather low poly.
