(S)potify Cyberpunk Cassette Player (Finished)

Vertrucio

Final Result:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XnPlGa

Also, for those still learning, this whole project started as a simple blockout, and a good amount of booleans:



----- Original Post Below -----

Started on a prop concept by Sheng Lam, the sPotify cassette player.

Found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zADNeZ

The Concept:



My Highpoly WIP



Going to finish off the strap and connector before doing final UVs.

sacboi

Brightened my day up, hard surface and cyberpunk : )

[...following]

Vertrucio

A lot more setup for baking behind the scenes, but almost done with the handle.

Vertrucio

Doing this during crunch is tough, but managed to get the UVs and geometry good enough to get some nice bakes. All modeling work should be done, on to textures.

Vertrucio

So I hit a snag. I put seams along the big bevels on each edge, and it's messing with the curvature bake.

As you can see there's a clear dark line. This messes with the texture generation, like for some simple edge wear. Triplanar does not fix this.


I have a few choices and I'm a little torn as to the best practice for eliminating it. I can just manually paint over the seams where they appear, which hides them well enough. I can alter the UV texture seams to put the seams along the sides, where I've created a new panel line just using normals that should hide things.

Only problem is, I've placed the UV seams where they are to avoid distortion on the decals, text, and other graphics. Am I overthinking things?

teodar23

Smart materials or smart masks are just a starting point not a one click solution (although sometimes it just works). I almost always need to tweak materials a bit by hand. You can also tweak the material by increasing contrast in the mask or by tweaking the curvature contribution to the mask.

Vertrucio

Thanks, I've gotten multiple solutions so I'm trying out a few. First of which is to just redo the UVs and placing  the top/bottom center cut onto a newly made panel line. This will make the UV not as clean in terms of pixel detail, but since I'm using substance to project/map details on, and not trying to paint logos directly onto the map, it's less an issue.

Experiments in trying to see if it's not baking from the correct highpoly/normal didn't lead to anything.

I was hand painting over it with decent success so that's a fallback.

Vertrucio

More progress, threw down some quick textures. Redoing some parts of the mesh to fix skew, and tangent space reduced the amount of wear I'd originally painted, but it'll be better in the long run. Only major modeling change is that the button tops need to be separated into their own UV shells, but that's an easy fix.

Vertrucio

More texture work, and dropped into marmoset to check the render. I'm not sure how to do the glass/plastic cover.

Vertrucio

Even more progress. Most of the base texture is done. Still needs an overall hand placed wear pass. Fixing up the button UVs next and figuring out how to texture the straps closer to the concept.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

DavidCruz

Only things i can see are missing labels & near the piece labeled REM make that circle darker.  Are you making the Cassette piece also? would be a nice touch if you did.

Vertrucio

And even more progress. I think I tried to address all the crits I got. Now just pushing to get that final polish.

Vertrucio

Calling this done. Learned a lot more modeling and texturing techniques.

Marmoset Viewer on Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XnPlGa

Vertrucio

I'm releasing all the incremental modeling saves and source files for this old project. This includes the all the incremental blender saves, marmoset baking, substance painter, and marmoset presentation file. This should show how I got from the most basic blocking, to finished. Moreso than where I started this thread.

I dug this up while recovering my backups from a HDD crash, and as part of building a new portfolio.

Google Drive Link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cgUbVMdxuwXxl0JCzlDK9QOU4H4i8qj0?usp=sharing

Original Concept by Sheng Lam:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zADNeZ

sacboi

Very generous an Awesome share!

Have a nice one 😎