The lovely Companion Cube

zaha

Hey everyone!

model

A few weeks back I was doing a project to get comfortable with Substance Painter again. Since I love the Portal games, I always wanted to give the Companion Cube my very own 3D treatment. This is a game ready asset with a polycount of about 6k triangles. My main focus was to make the material look mostly undamaged without looking too bland. Hope I achieved that.

I also tried to stay as close to the original as possible.

A few more renders can be found on artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6Kwdx

Would love to get some feedback on areas to improve.

One thing I noticed after the final renders are some face angle issues at the plates inbetween (can be seen in the last render). But I did not want to mess with the geometry after the UVs and materials have been done.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Add some wear and tear.  And not just willy nilly wear and tear

zaha

@Brian "Panda" Choi Thanks for your feedback! Do you mind elaborating a bit more on that? To be honest, I've been struggling coming up with wear and tear here that for one does not go overboard and for another makes sense.

At first I had more edge wear applied, showing a shiny metal material below the paint. But I found it to be too strong as I wanted to go for a rather clean look similar to the original in the game. I thought about adding some dirt, but that didn't fit well with me as there is no dirt in the laboratories.

So I ended up with adding dust to the cube, which might be too subtle since it's greyish-white on white for the plates and medium grey on the core.

Thinking about it, I will try to add a subtle paint chip effect to the hearts.

Brian "Panda" Choi

I encourage  you to go overboad because it will be easier to pull it back than to inch forward.

Just over do  it first.

zaha

Sooo, after quite some time I finally came around to revisit this project again. I added more wear, a chipping effect on the heart symbol and improved the roughness overall. I re-rendered everything and uploaded it on Artstation.

Here's a direct comparison, before and after:

I think it improved, looks more realistic now. Thanks for the feedback!