Skateboard PBR Practice

Semeru

Hey, gonna be posting in-progress shots of a next-gen skateboard I'm working on to try out PBR for the first time. The model is 13,000~ tris and at the moment I'm working on getting the normals nailed so that I can then put it into Quixel (so I wanna make sure I have perfect normals, object normals and AO bake before I start on the rest of the texturing).
Currently adding smaller normal details to the trucks and stuff in nDo and I'm going to re-unwrap the deck as the textures on the scratched and worn edges look like crap at the moment, so I'll need to re-bake that. I also need to tidy up normals on the trucks, get rid of all the pinching going on.

Gazu

Some Weeks ago i saw an nice Skateboard rendered in Unreal Engine 4.
He also posted his Stuff in the PC Forum.

Curious how yours will end.
Keep it comin

Suba

Texturing will play a big part on this. Keep it going !

Semeru

Cheers, yeah some parts like the wear on the edges I hope only looks bad because I don't have any specular to define it yet, we'll see!

.polygon

Looks like you need to look at some good reference of skateboards. Those indys are way off, the mounting bolts look to small also. the board shape looks weird, maybe its the front truck is too far back. Its a good model for your pbr test, lots of different materials.

Semeru

Yeah I kinda made some generic trucks from some ref then added the logos afterwards, wont be too hard to sort (the bolts and placement can be just a quick scale up/movement too)

Jeffrotull

Nice choice on the Independent trucks hah.

Semeru

just a quick update, gonna call the model and normals done in the sake of time, so now I can finally get on to the actual texturing!

riot

Looking good so far! The board looks quite flat however, it should be more concave and thin imo.



Looking forward to see how it looks with textures

Semeru

Thanks, yeah it is fairly curved, the angles I've got of it don't show it off as much but i can easily bend it some more once its textured!

tremulant

Give the nose and tail more curvature. Also the sides are reminding of a cheap board that was left out in the rain. One where the plies start to soak up moisture and separate . I'd say make the texture cleaner and tighter first and then go in and wreck it a bit. The grip tape needs to come out further to the edges. It doesn't really decay like that. If you skate on a board a lot the majority of wear is gonna happen near the nose and tail, but the solid edge should be mostly intact around the board. It's looking good in a lot of respects but it still needs work. Looking forward to seeing more.

tremulant

Also the edges are too rounded. The board should be flatter leading up to the outer perimeter then suddenly bulge out slightly with a roundness and then abruptly back to the flatter bottom side.

SaboR1996

That also looks a little thick to be a professional deck. my skateboard is about the thickness of my little finger nail, and my fingers are quite small.

Semeru

Cheers for all the crits and advice guys, I'm calling this done now so I can move onto other things. Learnt a lot about PBR and Quixel using this. There are a fair few things I'd like to alter, mainly absolutely nailing the shape before I texture; there's still a few things I know you guys will say is off that was just too awkward to change easily, but I've tried my best to get it as accurate as possible (i also wanted better wear on the trucks but Quixel is really awkward when it comes to adding details manually and easily).

Suba

That's a nice looking board. Cool job on the texture.

Semeru

Thanks man, Quixel also featured this on the splash page for their latest update, so I guess they must've seen this thread, so thanks for featuring me & creating a fantastic piece of software.