TWahl
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Little progress update: Not much to report since the holidays, however I have been experimenting with different resolutions in substance painter. Also practicing with making some more materials in my off time. I have been fine tuning the same master material I worked on previously, however upon opening it again after not looking at it for a few weeks (at least), there are some glaring flaws that became apparent which affect the overall realism. Still going to go for a rusty, sort of abandoned space station look (kind of like the derelict crafts in the dead space trilogy), however I am trying to focus on having nice textures that are not too muddled by granular details. In particular I was not happy with the paint and rust, so I will be working on fine tuning those more. I am also working on bumping up the texture maps to a working resolution of 4K. Then I will either export directly or downsample to 2K, although I think it might just be best to include the 4K material, along with downsampled 2K, 1K or even 512 x 512 maps. Then the end-user can decide on the resolution involved for their application (VR or cinematics come to mind). While 2K is still fairly high resolution it makes some detail painting in substance painter a little bit tricky, especially with the ID maps. The aliasing from the different colors can produce some artifacts which are undesireable, bumping up the resolution will help fix these problems. This will involve quite a bit of time rebaking all of my old maps, but the good news is that I can do this in the background while working on other more important tasks aformentioned. I have been thinking of trying to start creating a few modular assets out of the trim sheets and textures which I have already baked out as well. Thanks again to all who have been watching this thread and I apologize for being quiet for some time.
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My apologies for the lack of updates over the past weeks. Lately I have been busy with the holidays, and very recently (as of last week) due to the pandemic I have had to shift my focus towards finding new employment after mass layoffs at the company I work for as a consequence of restructuring. I have been chipping away at this project here and there for a while, however things might be slowing down for just a bit. I'll see what I can get done over the next few weeks but I cannot promise a lot for right now as my schedule and priorities are going to be shifting considerably. Thanks again for the continued support!
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I have been replaying dead space lately and that game has so far given me a lot of design ideas for the future. Same with Lost Planet 1 which I finished a week or two ago.
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Yes that is actually a lot like how I envision this particular texture to be used, maybe in some sort of core room where the player has to go in and destroy some critical equipment or machinery. I keep thinking of some top-secret technology that is used as well. Pipes and wires will all be modular assets that I will work on eventually as well. Super easy to model and I will probably start on those first after the corridor pieces I plan on creating using a trim sheet workflow (commonly used by a lot of studios these days and has been around forever). Believe me that due to the sheer amount of materials that I modeled and baked out, this probably will not be an issue haha. There are so many different types of floor and ceiling textures that it is sometimes hard to even comprehend. I made so many that I forgot what a few even look like! In terms of level design though, most of the more complex shapes I intend to carry accross using modular assets or purpose built pieces that will create more interesting corridor or room shapes beyond just square rooms or grid-like spaces. Buttresses, trusses, consoles, large vents and animated fans all come to mind: Below is one of the concept arts which I grabbed from the internet somewhere a long time ago which might give an idea of the setting and different types of assets I am trying to create. No idea who the original artist was but I guess if they see it here then I will give them their credit!
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- first person shooter
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Reactor wall I worked on today. This texture has lots of small details like pipes, vents and hoses which I used as a basis for expanding the master material set I am using. Thought I would post this, because it looked very cool with all of the different surfaces applied to it. Every day I am impressed by substance painter and its capabilities.
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Quick update on what is happening so far. Lately I have not had as much time to work in substance painter because I have been busy, however in my spare time I have been working on refining the base material which I will use to apply to the numerous textures I have created as part of the scifi collection. Little tweaks here and there mainly to make the results a little more pleasing and less noisy. Above I have tweaked a majority of the masks for rust as well as surface detail variations so that the metal is not too noisy/bumpy. Also reduced some of the height of the peeling paint details since they were sticking out a little too much before. Before it was beginning to look like the paint had been applied in a layer that was 5mm thick. In addition, I added a darker, heavier dust layer which is mainly isolated to the bigger crevices and cracks. I did this mainly to add more depth and make the panels stick out more. Also added details for rivets and "aluminum" pieces. Still need to do some work with variating the dark metal surfaces a bit more though. The brighter metal parts came out good and I am happy with them. Last thing on the list will be to clean up the master material file and make editing paint colors, base metal colors, etc. much easier so that I do not have to poke through the layer stack each time I want to change something. I will do this through anchor points and having "proxy layers" at the very bottom of the layer stack that do not impact the final look of the texture but instead serve as makeshift color selectors. I also still need to add a few more different materials such as rubber, for the textures that include hoses or related parts. Stay tuned.
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Finished adding a fixed spray paint material, which interacts with underlying surfaces and generates procedural overspray effects as well as slight variations in opacity. Emissive lights are still WIP, trying to improve that by having the underlying grease and dirt layers restrict their emissivity appropriately. Beginning to get close to a final master material - not much left to work on other than some different types of metal surfaces to break up some bare metal details, and possibly add a layer or group of layers for signage (like warning labels that are stuck onto the paint). I need to drag in some different textures to see how it interacts with different maps as well. Overall I have been very happy with how this is turning out, prior to this I was very worried that everything would look very off in painter after I had spent so much of my spare time modeling all of these textures. I am going to continue working on the master material set over the next week. When I am finished I will create another blog post to showcase a finalized result and possibly include a few technical explanations. Yes for each surface I have included a few color variation layers that break up smooth roughness and generate more interest and detail, makes for a more realistic surface. For the paint in particular, the beginning paint color/surface layer is set to a low roughness value (to mimic new paint), and each layer added progressively over top (wear, dirt, dust etc) takes the roughness back down until it looks worn. The masks/height variations of all of these layers are linked to underlying surface wears as well, which is how I was able to achieve a peeling paint and bubbling rust effect. When working in painter I have found that it is best to envision the progression of how a surface wears or ages, instead of trying to replicate the final result right off of the bat which gives weird results. I will tweak the roughness/height/color channels accordingly.
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Heavy machine grease:
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A close-up shot of the peeling paint and rust: Paint removed: Extreme rust: Flexibility accross different texture map inputs (normal, curvature, AO, world space normal, ID map).
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Spent the last day or so working on rust and more realistic procedural peeling paint. Still a few kinks I have to work out, but overall the maps and material properties are looking really good, a lot like I have envisioned. Next steps are going to involve more work on rust (for pieces that are fully rusted), as well as cleaner materials like aluminum for tech, latches or rivets to make them pop out more. More work to also be done on "spray painted" materials (for decals like numbers, arrows or signage) as well.
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Thank you - I take a lot of cues from polycount threads critiqueing other's 3D art and apply it to my work. People over there are very detail oriented and will shred your work apart over things that others would not normally pick out right away, so I like to take my time to ensure that everything looks as real as possible with colors, normal details etc. Reading/lurking a lot of those threads and the advices that are given there have taught me so many things about how to create good 3D assets and I regularly visit the site every other day just to see what gets posted. Part of it too is that when I eventually have to go sell these materials I will have to compete with other works of similar quality, so it is important to stand out and make sure that I deliver. Take a look at some of the top sellers on Turbosquid or other 3D asset marketplaces and you will see what I mean. Hardware wise my computer that I built is pretty darn beefy, even for SP but honestly even a mid-range PC will allow you to make decent 3D assets. A good CPU, 16gb ram and a decent mid-range graphics card will allow you to do a good amount of high-poly modeling for example.
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Spent some time today working on making more realistic base metal for future use. Will be working with SP in parallel to creating the remaining ID maps so that when I get to the painting process I will already have some idea for how I want to move forward with the final look of each texture. In SP I will be able to tweak the individual values of the metal to produce the final look I want, for each specific part of the texture (this is where color ID maps come into play). In addition to metal, I will also be doing some studies for creating more realistic paint, wear effects, lights, insignia/signage, etc. In some of my previous test screenshots within SP I mostly played around with adding filters on top of each other which produced somewhat decent results, however there were areas of the textures that still looked weird or the grunge did not make sense, so I am going to spend a pretty good amount of time making sure that all of my materials will look good on each surface instead of being too mudgy or homogenous. This step will also allow me to more easily organize my layer stack and make the actual process of churning each final texture out a much less painful process. The details need to look as good as possible overall, since this step can easily make or break the final product. Stay tuned for more updates.
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Finished modeling all textures, currently burning through all of the color ID maps at a fast rate. Aiming to get at least 10 done per day so I expect to have the remaining ones for the wall textures done within the next week or so. After which will be time to hop into substance painter to begin creation of a master material set and begin painting/exporting the completed maps.
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Next timelapse will involve texture painting, when I get to that stage (very soon). Thanks for the support! -
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Renewed my Fusion 360 license tonight, apparently it expired while I took a break. Luckily I got it at a discount! Going to resume progress tomorrow. Might try to do a timelapse video as well, would be cool.
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Yeah - makes me wonder where they come from, some of my pictures from this thread show up on google image results, I am thinking that people are viewing the thread to look for reference material/inspiration for their own 3d models or textures. Only reason I think that is because I typically will do exactly that when I need some ideas/references for things to create! I also wonder if there are any visitors from other game engine forums... Again I apologize for the lack of updates. Since the weather has started to get cold again I have been hit with allergies (non covid-related). So my mental stamina has been slightly lower than usual. Luckily I have been feeling better lately, so I plan on firing up my rig again to resume content creation very soon.
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Had to take a brief hiatus from working on this due because I was busy with moving. I plan on resuming progress this week as normal, when I feel comfortable. If anything it felt nice to take a break after being "on" for such a long period of time. Thanks everyone.
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Quick update... Work is pretty much complete on nearly all of the highpoly models of the wall textures... Just a few more to create and bake out in Xnormal and then I will be able to start making the color ID maps. I expect to have the ID maps done sometime by the beginning of the week after next week. Total number of textures stands at 201, after taking into account some of the walls having minor detail variants. Below shows a few snapshots of the my most recent work:
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- 3ds max
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I set up a dim omni light in the middle of the scene as well as a series of white-ish omni lights on the walls. (FYI Omni lights are also the same as conventional point lights in Max, in case you were wondering).
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Took a break from 3d modeling work for the past few days, decided to play around with lighting and other effects in 3ds max to get a general sense of what types of environment/moods can be created. I made a material with some emissive maps and applied it to my simple cube scene, thought I would post it since it turned out pretty cool (3ds max rendering): More to come later on...
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Progress Update + Planning For Next Steps
TWahl commented on TWahl's blog entry in Work in Progress - Scifi PBR Media
Back in 2017 I had initially created hand-drawn heightmaps, I chose to remodel them all in 3d for baking/texturing (not to mention higher visual quality). I figured that I might as well try to replicate them all since I had put in all the work to create them when I started. In total there were 50 plus for floors, walls, and trims. Most of these hand drawn heightmaps were based completely or at least partly on work I did back when I was younger (2010-onward), so there was some sentimental value on re-imagining past work from when I was still learning I guess. Makes no sense to not use whatever reference material I already had available as inspiration. The other reason is that I am trying really hard to give the end-user the most amount of art variation possible. Too many times I have bought asset packs in the past where the visuals got irritably repetitive very quickly because you only had a small selection of assets to choose from. I would like the end-user to have no two rooms look visually the same, hence the sheer amount of content. As far as structure goes, I am taking this project in phases. Right now is the modeling/baking phase. Then will be the texturing phase, environment modeling phase, prop modeling phase, product/marketing/research finalization phase, and so on. In between these phases I exercise open-ended creativity as much as possible, but the advantage of taking an organized approach like this (where I track what is or is not completed) allows me to: See the amount of work I am completing more visually in real time, and also what I have remaining to do without hunting and pecking for files. Plan ahead for the amount of content I intend on including, relative to what I have already available or completed. Ensure that quality remains consistent and that I am devoting my full effort into a single step of the asset creation process before moving onto the next. I wont have some items finished while others are half way done, for example. This also prevents burnout. Have a better idea of what exactly the next steps in the plan will be, and ensure that I am fully prepared/have all materials ready to move onward (i.e., having all maps and models baked out for substance painter). I say 30 or so more wall textures, simply because I started with 57 hand-drawn height map images, and have updated my excel tracker for the ones that I have already completed. I could easily add more content if I would like, and in that case I would simply add more entries into my tracker. It is also worth mentioning that I work as an engineer in the automotive industry during my day job, so for our projects we tend to use similar forms of tracking (open issues lists for meetings, project milestones, assessment checklists, deliverable checklists, project trackers/forms, etc). I applied the same methodologies here, albeit on a relativelt smaller scale. I hope that clarifies things a little bit - I might not have explained everything entirely clearly since I am pretty tired tonight but I might take a look at this tomorrow and see if there is anything that I am leaving out that I can elaborate on.
