“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” --Norman Vincent Peale
I plan to combine these two splash screens… i have no idea if i will succeed in this task or not, i’ve picked the ones i personally consider the harder and more complex for me to do, most elements and most headache inducing scene. I will have a hard time, i will feel like i dont belong in the 3D scene, i will question my own existence. I’ve picked my own hell and im going to go for a walk.
Will share my emotional injuries along the way in this post.
so it has a lot of parts obviously and very complex material nodes. I will have to remake most materials to use a simple PBR setup so sketchfab can read them properly.
About the model i will do some modifications as shown below:
Since my final scene composition will involve a humoristic situation, i will remove one arm and will also have to make his legs because he will be shown full body on the main key shot.
I’ll probably remove the helmet too…
Some components of his armor will have to be simplified a bit to reduce overall polycount in areas not very visible or important.
Right now im analizing this model and figuring out a game plan to attack this guy.
This will be the first milestone. After this guy is complete i will continue with the junkyard scene.
now i need to go piece by piece and try to see if i can optimize the mesh a bit because i’ve seen some parts have many subdivisions and bevel filters with many segments (some up to 8) Other parts are completly invisible to the camera and under the armor, need to clean up before doing any texture work.
My plan was to go piece by piece and try to optimize it, but they are way too many… 14 million triangles…
after a closer inspection, i will need to remodel junks and combine others into larger junks…
some details are too small to give them polycount… a lot of texture baking will be needed.
Im guessing i will have to focus on portions, remesh, bake and move on…
i did a lot of trial and error tests to find how i would simplify this model. And since i want to also add the junk yard scene i will need to reduce the poly count a lot, so i think i will just opt for covering big chunks of the character in a mesh cage and bake a lot of parts into big polygons.
Did this test on the shoes, here you can see side by side the poly reduction. Hopefully i will be able to bake the high mesh into the low mesh and make it look decent…
Since the camera will never do a closeup on my final keyshot, im not concerned about small details.
the hard part is to convert this model into something a web viewer like sketchfab can see. It’s not so trivial of a task as one would imagine… im encountering many issues i was not especting!
one thing that give the biggest headache is that Blender wont bake a Collection Instance… and if you hit “make instances real” everything breaks.
Also, the Blenderman main scene is using collections that, for some reason, were renamed, so they can’t be found on the “parts” scene without manually clicking on each element to check the info… was this done to obfuscate the file in some weird way?
Another thing that would save a lot of time is if Sketchfab’s plugin could “flatten” a material’s node PBR inputs onto images… I mean… converting whatever complex node structure you have into an image for each input of the node…
Right now the only viable option i found is to enter each collection and do the baking there, but this will take a lot of time, idk if it’s worth it, it is very repetitive and i lose the hability to combine many elemenets into a same UV sheet… not easily at least… i could find a way but it shouldn’t be this “hard”…
no metallic or specular or AO… i mean 5 textures per element seems like a lot of work…
im still experimenting with mesh cages shapes so as to cover as much geometry as possible… i really dont want to have to remesh everything, it will be too heavy i think in the end and not even visible unless you zoom in a lot… if he is full body in the shot, most geometry is irrelevant, like screws and stuff…
Another bake test… i dont like it but im getting closer.
-When you bake a material that has metalic in it, for some reason the color looks darker on the bake…
I will re-try this with a diferent cage setup. This is looking alright but i think if i separate the armor plates from the rest it might look better…
im caging elements in groups. This would be the base of the torso, then i have to do the silver armor next, cables and gadgets at the end…
But now i think it looks a bit better. If you see this comparision, on the left is the baked version, on the right is the full res original version. I think it looks acceptable enough to move on, this method looks like is going to produce a nice result…
vivaldi, mozart, doom & quake mixes, trance even some dua lipa 
