WXS-07 'Depopulator'

#16

@Joo52 Thanks for the comment. I’ll be posting up Substance Painter WIP images later. Yes, micro-detail like bubbling paint/superficial scratches/etc, and some of the rubber elements have panel lines and raised nodule detail. This is all captured in the normal and height channels and can be combined in Vray with the Normal Bump map node.

Towards the end of the modeling process I started to think of my final illustration. The last few projects I’ve done, I’ve taken them straight from Zbrush to Keyshot to render passes, and finish up with a paintover in Photoshop. This process has been popular for a number of years now and can be quite liberating in comparison to days and days of shader look dev/render testing that often accompanies rendering a straight beauty pass from Vray(with render element passes) The Keyshot process is different(but can be done in any renderer including Zbrush) as I’m just rendering passes of different materials/lighting which will be masked and heavily painted in Photoshop…So with all that said, this time I decided to return to Vray for the endless hours upon hours of watching tiny render buckets crawl across my screen…:slight_smile:

Then I hit a complete spell of indecision on the colour scheme I wanted to go for. I tormented myself and became obsessed to the point of abandoning the project for nearly 2 months as I was not sure what direction in which to take the colouring!! There is so much well-known sci-fi work out there with easily recognisable and iconic colour schemes that this was a much harder decision than I thought. Eventually I settled on the scheme below, having tested the good old orange/white/grey scheme…the black/red theme…the blue/yellow theme…and a few others.(another fantastic bonus of SP:trial and error/iteration/realtime colour scheme brainstorming;) ) The military drab olive/yellow/black(and tiny hints of orange, later) worked well for me in the end, I feel. So that 2 months lost wasn’t procrastination, it was research, dammit! :slight_smile:

As crazy/compulsive/ocd as this may seem to some, this was probably the most important point in the project for me and I just refused to continue until I was 100% on the scheme. If you’re going to give many, many hours of your life to a personal project, don’t rush it. You’ll only do it once so make it count.

The primary reason for the choice of rendering in Vray was Substance Painter. As I had the character fully UV-ed, I thought it would be a great opportunity to run the entire lot through SP and see what comes out. Plus I wanted to see what the high-poly workflow would be like and also an excuse to play with the SP Vray export preset. Here’s an early look-dev test with the first iteration of the smart material to test the export preset and set up the basic shader in Vray. This is just with a few base layers and some blocking out/masking.
And also, a major plus for the texturing/rendering in Vray Vs material render pass comping in something like Keyshot is that you’re not locked to a camera view, so you can set up the shot from any perspective and have all that texture detailing for free;) whereas in the other workflow you have to recomp/repaint from scratch for every illustration.

This was a smart material that I built up from scratch in SP. The beauty of it was that I could build this template material and run all the other assets through it, ensuring consistency throughout.(as I think I mentioned earlier there are nearly 40 different armour parts) and because all the parts were still high-poly I couldn’t just bring them all in to SP together. But with the smart material I wouldn’t have to as I knew it would work seamlessly on all the parts. I’ll post up the material tree in a later post.

#17

Another Vray look-dev test with the SP material taken a little further:

#18

Wow, a very interesting project. Not only artistically but educational as well. Although I don’t specifically use the toolsets, but nonetheless there’s processes here that I can definitely apply in my own work. So thanks very much Daniel for sharing your workflow and opening this thread, duly bookmarked.

#19

@sacboi, thanks for the kind words, mate. I always like reading through threads with a bit of a breakdown so I thought I’d take the time to develop one for anyone interested. And because it’s nice to have a look back on the project this way, once you’ve completed it, I feel.

Some more Substance Painter screengrabs:

And another early Vray look-dev test:

#20

Some more SP screengrabs:

So by now I’m sure you can see the benefit of creating/using smart materials. Think of texturing an entire game like this, ensuring consistency across all assets with the same material theme. And also the ability to change the colour scheme/dirt/grime/scratches very quickly by just tweaking or enabling/disabling layers.

#21

more SP pics, a comparison pic from SP viewport to Vray render…and a shameless plug for a Gumroad tutorial I put together when I finished the texturing…replete with cheesy promo. Gumroad link if anyone’s interested https://gumroad.com/musashidan#

//youtu.be/XdCNht6vjoc

#22

Here is a breakdown of the Smart material and the various channels in SP

#23

All the armour pieces are a painted metal material and each one had a metallic mask. I usually start with a mask generator as a base to work from and using some custom brushes/alphas and some of the SP preset brushes I make use of the brilliant feature added recently in SP - the ability to paint directly on masks, as I always hand-paint on every mask generator I create.

#24

For the project I created a set of simple custom alphas that I used in Zbrush detailing, and SP texturing and normal map painting. I also made a stencil sheet for decal painting. The alphas are easy to create in Photoshop: simple shapes at 512x512 and blurred more/less for softer/sharper transition when stamping. Heightmap alphas can also be created quickly in Zbrush using grabdoc for more detailed stamp details. Or in SP2 a normal map channel can be added which you can bake normal map stamps for.

#25

Here are some of the rubber parts, textured using the same method of a custom-built Smart material across multiple assets.

And here you can see the normal map details painted to a map directly in Substance Painter. This workflow(and using the heightmaps from ZB) eliminates the need to create floating geometry for baking details to normal maps.

#26

When all the armour/suit parts were textured I moved onto texturing/shading the head. Texturing was also done in SP, using the ‘airbrush’ method.
This is a popular approach to painting skin/organics and comes from the traditional sculpting/silicon mask-making techniques. Layering on the skin tones using different tones for different regions. This gradual building up of many layers can give quite a natural look and is a quite enjoyable process.
I painted an epidermal(top layer) and subdermal(tissue below the surface of the skin layer) map, which were piped into the Vray skin material.

I also experimented with painting a base reflection map(mostly derived from an AO/cavity/SSS map ripped from 3dsMax’s Render Surface Map tools) which I then duplicated and adjusted in PS for the glossiness map.

#27

Next it’s onto shader look-dev in Vray. I always have my scene setup in Max and SP simultaneously, and just paint/adjust/save, test render…tweak shader…paint, adjust, save…render…tweak shader… NOTE: Just make sure you’re not using SP’s default .png file format as the .png plugin in Max is broken and the link to SP will not work. I usually use 16bit .tiff

This way you can pretty much get instant feedback on the results. Although I have come to realise that Substance Painter is pretty much a WYSIWYG environment and towards the end I was confident that the results in the Painter viewport are practically 1:1 with Vray. This ends up saving a lot of time as the test render phase can be a long…long step in a project.

And finally I can see how it’s all coming together. I often ‘printscreen’ renders and paste them to PS for quick adjstments/paintovers
as this can lead to new ideas, or inspiration.

#28

So once I had completed all the modeling/texturing, and had everything assembled in 3dsMax, I realised that this bloke definitely needed some sort of base, or platform. So it was back to Zbrush again for some more hard-surface action… :slight_smile: This time using Zmodeler/Radial symmetry:

#29

The platform was also textured in Substance Painter using the very same techniques:

#30

Having created the platform I still felt something was missing…an environment! :slight_smile:
So I set about building one. The elements were created in Zbrush/3dsMax, and the scene assembled in 3dsMax. About 10% of the geo in the scene is kit-bashed from a Vitaly set and Zbrush IM brushes.

The great thing about building a cylindrical environment is that it’s so useful to be able to ‘steal’ shapes from the topology. All the pipes are spline shapes extracted from the main set so they already in place, and as they are editable splines I could make use of this powerful toolset in max. Also, any object can have it’s pivot aligned to the main set and be clone-rotated for perfect placement very easily.

#31

I then began texturing. I didn’t need to put as much work into this stage as the environment would be in the background and probably depth-blurred(which it was) but I was addicted to Substance Painter at this stage so I didn’t care…:slight_smile:

#32

For texturing a lot of the background props i tested out a tiling texture idea I had in mind for Substance Painter. I just imported a square proxy plane with UVs from 3dsMax and textured it using tiled maps and procedurals. You get the normal/height, and roughness for free as you’re working across the whole material at once. Plus the all the map detail is synced. Then I just exported the maps using the same Vray preset.

#33

And an example asset. So quick to do as you don’t even need to unwrap the UVs. You can just apply box-mapping or use the Vray tri-planar-tex map.
And bearing in mind that this is a background prop, this is good enough. Spend time where you need it. :slight_smile: I could have just used any old shader but I like to use personal projects to test out new ideas/workflows so it’s never time wasted.

#34

With the scene assembly/lighting rig finalised(after days of experimentation/testing ) and everything in place it’s time for final renders! NOTE: not as exciting as it sounds…

The character was saved out as a Vray Proxy for the final stages of rendering

#35

I will often printscreen a render in progress from the frame buffer and just start experimenting in PS whilst the render is still ongoing. This will be a noisy/grainy image but it doesn’t matter as it’s just for testing purposes.
Call it impatience…:slight_smile: but it’s great to be able to get ahead of yourself and try out different ideas just like sketching. No matter how crap it looks, as nobody will ever see it…oh!..wait!..too late…