[DONE] Cannon Haut-Kœnigsbourg
polycounter lvl 2
On my vacation to Castle Haut-Kœnigsbourg (France, Earth), I was impressed by a massive canon/artillery from the 17th Century (1633 to be exact!). As I was just dabbling in the world of 3D, I decided to try to replicate it. I tried taking lots of pictures as I wasn't able to revisit the cannon. My girlfriend was already starting to get annoyed, as I was making 50+ reference pictures of all the small details.
As this was a large project for me to incorporate all the details of the cannon, I was pretty overwhelmed at first.
I started with a simple blockout to get a feel of the scale and weight of the cannon. I get lost really fast in the details, but this is clearly not the way to go.
As you can see in the first picture, the cannon barrel has a lot of details and height information. I tried sculpting everything but this was not ideal for me as I am not that good at sculpting. I created vectors that I could load as a bitmap into Substance Designer, to create a height map. Next I used this to add these to my normal map in Substance Painter. The handles and backplate of the cannon are sculpted and baked onto lowpoly mesh.
Next I textured the wood, iron and barrel with Substance Painter. I finished this project before I knew about Polycount, otherwise I would have made this a WIP topic! As you can see I didn't stick completely to the reference image as the cannon (as displayed in the castle) is also a replica. I didn't have a clue how to texture the wood with a black varnish (as in the reference picture) and keep the details.
Things I learned
- I had modifiers applied to my mesh and they would break my UV map when exporting for baking to Substance Painter. I had lots of troubles with this and it did take a long time before I figured it out.
- I really struggled with the texel density of the mesh. I am pretty content with the texel density of the wood but the barrel and iron look pretty noise due to low texel density. I should use a texel density checker in my future projects.
- I worked way too long on this prop. I need to give myself a certain period and stop adding details.
- Lighting a prop is **** difficult!
- Sculpting needs improvement hehe
I hope you could still give me feedback!
Link to my first post (ever) on ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/g2xq4Z
As this was a large project for me to incorporate all the details of the cannon, I was pretty overwhelmed at first.
I started with a simple blockout to get a feel of the scale and weight of the cannon. I get lost really fast in the details, but this is clearly not the way to go.
As you can see in the first picture, the cannon barrel has a lot of details and height information. I tried sculpting everything but this was not ideal for me as I am not that good at sculpting. I created vectors that I could load as a bitmap into Substance Designer, to create a height map. Next I used this to add these to my normal map in Substance Painter. The handles and backplate of the cannon are sculpted and baked onto lowpoly mesh.
Next I textured the wood, iron and barrel with Substance Painter. I finished this project before I knew about Polycount, otherwise I would have made this a WIP topic! As you can see I didn't stick completely to the reference image as the cannon (as displayed in the castle) is also a replica. I didn't have a clue how to texture the wood with a black varnish (as in the reference picture) and keep the details.
Things I learned
- I had modifiers applied to my mesh and they would break my UV map when exporting for baking to Substance Painter. I had lots of troubles with this and it did take a long time before I figured it out.
- I really struggled with the texel density of the mesh. I am pretty content with the texel density of the wood but the barrel and iron look pretty noise due to low texel density. I should use a texel density checker in my future projects.
- I worked way too long on this prop. I need to give myself a certain period and stop adding details.
- Lighting a prop is **** difficult!
- Sculpting needs improvement hehe
I hope you could still give me feedback!
Link to my first post (ever) on ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/g2xq4Z
Replies
The cannon barrel in particular doesn't feel like metal but more like stone. The barrel in your ref. is much less rusty and more metallic, polished, and dark in color. I think the material you have on the barrel would look better as a layer on top of the metal mat. with a mask so it's just in the crevasses.
If you still want to add a varnish layer to the wood material you can. Just add a new layer with a dark color and low roughness value, then blend it down into the wood with multiply, and mask out the areas where the varnish has worn off.
I thought making the model dark/black like in the reference photo, it wouldn't be a very interesting prop.