Spaceship model
This is a personal project that explored hard-surface modelling and texturing approaches.
-
Modelled in Blender with use of the Machine tool, Mesh Machine, and Bool Tools add-ons.
Textures were created using the Substance suite. Rendered in Unreal Engine.
This project used tileable textures with mesh decals to add detail. This had multiple advantages, it allowed a high level of texture details without the need for large textures, and tileable and decal textures could be reused in other places in a larger project.
However, it does require a larger number of texture and material draw calls for this model in isolation, and all details needed to be placed by hand. I was able to make some of this more time efficiently by using splines to place the seams between metal plates, and further exploration of the workflow might find a similar method for adding edge wear to exposed edges.
Without baked normals, the model had to have perfect normals. I found small chamfers combined with face weighted normals to achieve a good balance between performance, time spent modelling, and visual quality.
-
Based on the concept by Galan Pang
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Bgra6
Rendered animation
Turntable Video
Wireframe Model. Blue edges will be chamfered. Red edges indicate UV seams.
Base materials for the spaceship, one for painted and one for metallic surfaces. Each used 2 tile-able textures: normal and masks.
Base colour of surface was set in engine.
Black and white mask texture for decals to add details to paint. These affected the underlying colour and roughness.
The second row of tile-able and trimsheet decals also affected the normal map.
More unique decals were modelled then baked, this allowed for more detail and control of the height.
These used a height map for parallax occlusion, as well as a normal map with opacity and edge masks packed into the blue and alpha channel.
Wireframe showing decals
Rendered view of decals