model finalization: Trenchshovel & Bolex H16

DragonGuard

Hey guys.

I recently finished my last exam for this semester so I'm now on a 2 week break before school starts again.
I'm taking some time to go over my work from this semester and update it a bit, either adding some final touches/polish or just redoing my presentations. I've decided to make a topic about it to have a place to track my progress on things, make sure I don't get stuck on unimportant details and maybe get some feedback and critique.

First off I redid my unreal presentation for my melee weapon assignment. I made a ww2 German trench shovel for this but wasn't happy with my initial unreal render, so I went back in the last few days and redid my entire light setup, trying a lot of different colors and settings. This is deff. an aspect I still need some serious practice in.

EDIT:
Finished my model.


more images in the final post or at my artstation page, as well as a sketchfab link.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Y6LPw




This was one of my initial renders:


Redid my scene and currently have this:


Sketchfab:
model

My final model ended up being about 1.4k tris and I used 2k texturemaps.
Modeled and baked in 3dsmax, textures were done in Photoshop.


Next I want to finish up my exam assignment. We had to pick any complex enough object from between the first and second word war and turn it into a "hero prop". Given the period most people picked a gun, which was super tempting (hello sexy FG42), but ended up going with a Bolex H16 filmcamera which also looks pretty sweet.

This was my main reference, with the 3 lenses on the front.


I ended up having to rush the texture a bit and had to drop some details that weren't super noticeable for my presentation. This will be what I'll be working on the next few days whenever I have free time. Please let me know what you guys think as I go along. I'm really happy with how the model itself turned out, so I really want to turn this into a sweet portfolio piece of possible .

My Unreal renders for this were pretty garbage. I didn't know about the auto exposure setting and ended up super over lighting my object. Also some things I'm missing compared to my reference. I still need to add detail to the lenses and am missing 2 small screens on the side that have yet to be textured. Also overall needs another go at the textures and localisation of dirt and damage.


We were allowed to texture in SubstancePainter, so I took some renders from it as well, which look at least a bit better, but I want to present it in a game engine.


High and lowpoly in Max


My current model and textures on sketchfab. I listed it as hidden since it's not done yet.
mod

Daf57

Great job with both!

DragonGuard

I'm Still working on the textures of my Bolex camera. I haven't had super much progress the last few days.
So far I tweaked my materials a bit, redid most decals and groves on the lenses and dials, added texture to the 2 small windows on the side and added the text/stripes to the first lens and viewfinder. Still need to add the text detail to the other 2 lenses and then redo the dirt and scratches localization.


I did make a small tutorial for some friends on how I fixed a texture seams on my shovel model that would have been hard to fix by hand, but ended up only taking me 5-10min to fix.
I guess this isn't new info for most people here, but I figured I post it anyway, in case it could be useful to anyone.

Initially I had this stretching and seam on the end of my handle because of the way I did my Uv's. By hand this would have been tedious and time consuming to get right, especially because photoshop doesn't give direct feedback on changes you make until you save it out and load it into max/unreal/... So Instead I used the 3dsmax projection modifier to fix it for me.



Here you can see why this is an issue when I just use a single wood texture as my base.
To be accurate with my materials I also need this part to be end wood, rather than normal grain.


So the way I went about fixing this is by copying this selection as a separate object and applying a wood end texture to it using a uvwmap. Important here is to get mesh from both sides of the seam. The uvwmap makes new uvs for us and projects the texture to it accordingly. It's not perfect as there is some amount of stretching because of the curvature further from the center, but it's not that bad and the worst affected part will be blended into the regular wood anyway.


Next you put a projection modifier onto your original, unwrapped lowpoly mesh and include the newly created endcap mesh as a reference, making sure the cage encompasses it.


Next by going to Rendering->Render to Texture, or press 0 on the keyboard we can render this new wood texture onto our old mesh as a regular diffuse map.


This will give us the following result, which we can then overlay and blend into our actual texture maps.


In this case I did it to fix my wood, but you can use this with any object and texture you want.

DragonGuard

Time flew kind of by with school starting again. Found some time to finish my textures and build a nice presentation in Unreal. I think it's quite the improvement from my previous version. Still ran into a few things I'll do differently next time.