Ok so this has been a huge learning curve - the model is almost finished, just a few things to tidy up. But, I need advice…I don’t even know where to start on texturing something on this scale - keep it in Blender or dive into Substance Painter? Try and go with procedural textures or UV unwrap everything and go to Photoshop?
Any comment or advice on the model welcome! I’ve tried to keep it accurate to the real thing, where I can (there’s a lot of variation in the real tanks) but those rivets are the bane of my life.
Nicely done model. I really like vehicles from this period. All those rivets add character.
I tried (briefly) to learn Substance Painter, but the learning curve was more than I wanted to endure, so I’ve stuck with Photoshop and procedural textures. I think you’re going to have to unwrap everything whether you use Substance Painter or Photoshop. (Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.)
My recommendations:
I’m hoping you’ve already done the UV layout for your tracks. Doing that early in the process is much better than after you’re done. In fact, you can save some resources by making one master track and making all the other tracks instances of the original. You can make a simple base shader for the bare metal track and then use the Geometry Node’s “Position” attribute to create random masks for each instance of the track. This will create unique random splotches of dirt and weathering on all the instances. I’ve attached screen shots of a shader doing similar work on my MK V tracks. The images with the red lines show the result of each Mix Shader. The second image shows a detail of how the Geometry nodes are used to create masks that create unique weathering for each instance of the track link.
Since many of the sides of your tank are flat and the rivets are small, you may be able to get away with doing orthographic projections of each side of the tank. This way your rivets would be nicely placed in the UV space. It may be easier than putting each rivet and body panel in its own UV space.
Aye, there’s a post on the “Finished Projects” page. But here you go! I’ll be doing more with it but I want to work on a couple of other projects for a bit.
