spray cans (WIP)

oraeles77

i've spent the last few months making some spray cans as props for a scene im working on.

the labels were captured using photogrammetry.

 the metal parts of the cans I manually retopologied. so I've got a pretty good work flow now.

a few of these were cans I found floating in my local river while kayaking.

3 of them were done by someone sending me a turntable video of the can being rotated and then I took screenshots from the video, with only point of perspective, it wasnt the most ideal stuff for photogrammetry, but I found that its better to use 700 screenshots instead of just 40 etc. and I got a pretty good quality scan of the label which is the only important bit I needed.

one of the cans a professional friend photographed for me in his studio last year and I had already modelled it, but I re did it in my new work flow and improved it compared to my previous model and I was able to see limitations in the photos they sent me.

finally a friend has given me 2 bags of vintage spray paint ,stuff 'obtained' back in the 1980s, for exmaple one of those cans of Marabu paint still has a Deutschmark price tag on it! if you are into spray paint you will be impressed at that.

so if the weather is ideal for photgrammetry, a bit cloudy, from around 2pm I can take photos at the rear of my house and get a good diffused northerly light which perfect for photogrammetry, I use a bit of white card for an infinite background and as the can is circular its pretty easy to just manually rotate the can instead of using a turntable or a 'lazy susan', if I dont have enough photos and the model is coming out looking 'a bit crap' I just take notes of what bits are looking shit and I take more photos, of that area, maybe another 50-80 photos.

jod13

That's intense, but it looks great! To be honest, I had initially assumed you created or googled the labels because the colors fit together so well, but having read all the work you put into finding and recreating real ones, it's super impressive. You might be able to push the roughness variation in one or two of them just to up that texture contrast but that's a nitpicky polish comment looking at them directly; you said they're part of a larger scene, so they may not need it if they're smaller props in a larger space. 

oraeles77

jod13 said:

That's intense, but it looks great! To be honest, I had initially assumed you created or googled the labels because the colors fit together so well, but having read all the work you put into finding and recreating real ones, it's super impressive. You might be able to push the roughness variation in one or two of them just to up that texture contrast but that's a nitpicky polish comment looking at them directly; you said they're part of a larger scene, so they may not need it if they're smaller props in a larger space. 

these props will be tiny and insignificant but i just like doing them.

here were some cans I made 2 years ago...

<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xzzlY4">https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xzzlY4</a> <br>

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that time I manually draw the labels using Inkscape, it took a while but ask i wanted stuff which looked really neat and spotlessly clean and photogrammetry cant quite do that.

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today we had the right sort of weather/ambient light but I was feeling shit so i did some more photography, 150 photos of one can, and it came out shit, so that was a waste of time!<br>

 

it will be part of this... but thats a story for another day...

DavidCruz

I like the professional looking bombs, with all the fancy colors, like those wall murals they get some pro's to do.  One section or parts of sections of this train might benefit from some.  1st thought was ask some people around some art discords or whatever to draw up what they think some tags would look like.  (the reason) variety of different perspectives on the tags make "tags" stand out more to me.  I always looked out for pieces made here and there, when i was a kid for the 1st time ever, i saw a FLIP BOOK on a train station pass, i loved it and wanted to see it every time i passed by it going to my grandma's house.  It was like a rocket taking off and exploding like a fire work, i was so amused by it that it definitely turned me towards art at my young age.  
(sadly) i think they painted over it, smh it was really amazing and an achievement that was beyond impressive to me.

Just wanted to share that and maybe it gives people who work in games with trains and tunnels some amazing ideas for some kids playing their games, to make them feel in that moment as i felt in my younger years.   Anyway congrats, look forward to more.

oraeles77

DavidCruz said:

I like the professional looking bombs, with all the fancy colors, like those wall murals they get some pro's to do.  One section or parts of sections of this train might benefit from some.  1st thought was ask some people around some art discords or whatever to draw up what they think some tags would look like.  (the reason) variety of different perspectives on the tags make "tags" stand out more to me.  I always looked out for pieces made here and there, when i was a kid for the 1st time ever, i saw a FLIP BOOK on a train station pass, i loved it and wanted to see it every time i passed by it going to my grandma's house.  It was like a rocket taking off and exploding like a fire work, i was so amused by it that it definitely turned me towards art at my young age.  
(sadly) i think they painted over it, smh it was really amazing and an achievement that was beyond impressive to me.

Just wanted to share that and maybe it gives people who work in games with trains and tunnels some amazing ideas for some kids playing their games, to make them feel in that moment as i felt in my younger years.   Anyway congrats, look forward to more.

hey David, i was posting the train image just to give a bit of context as to what the spray cans are about, im not actually looking for help or support regarding the graffiti because I've seen the inside of a police cell and a court room more than enough times over the last 20 years due to my own involvement with the anti-social phenomenon of 'international transit graffiti'. All of the graffiti designs I've used are done by other people, the simple reason for this is that each artist/writer/vandal/loser (or whatever phrase you want to use) has their own 'handstyle' and no matter how many times I write another word it still looks like mystyle, so I've spent a huge amount of time over the last year collecting sketches from friends (something Im not into normally doing), or looking through old blackbooks and for a lot of the less important background stuff I've just borrowed/plagarised stuff I've encountered online.  you'd be surprised at how many friends who upload photos everyday to instagram or FB  can't quite do a sketch on a piece of white fucking paper and take a photo of it then email it to us!

Then I've been either cleaning up png/jpeg files in Gimp and exporting them with a mask, or redrawing everything to make an alpha transparancy which I've then exported to Substance painter, so I've got a massive library of tags/handstyles etc across a huge spectrum of skill levels.

the above is just a tiny tiny selection of it.

the second thing is that like most things in the real world, graffiti doesn't actually resemble the way people imagine them in their head, most graffiti is fucking shit  or its just a splatter/blur of different pieces intersecting above each other.

the sort of style im going for is early-mids 90s european metro, which was really the golden age of euro-train graff hooliganism, with cities like Roma, Amsterderam, Hamburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, Athens, Warszawa, Praha having systems which were really 'battered' and covered in paint.

this is another train I've completed, it also has unique 'graffiti maps' internally in every carriage, but thats not too interesting for me.

this is part of the third train's graffiti map being painted, each carriage's external 'graffiti map' is 4k, which really isnt big enough. but 8k would just be too much drain on the system.

im planning on having 6 unique different trains on this project im doing.

each train has different decals for serial numbers etc.