06: Personal work

 To practice everything I have learned from the research and the people I spoke to, I am creating my own 3D asset and texturing it to be as photoreal as possible. I will be using techniques learned from artist such as Jason and Chun Chun, trying to follow their steps and thought process.

To begin with I chose to create a fire hydrant. I believe this would have a lot of details as it would be exposed to the environment for a long time. 

I aim to create a low polycount game prop that is as realistic as possible using 1 2k texture. I will also texture a higher polygon version of this just for comparison. 

I gathered multiple references and input them in Puref. 

This will be my main reference.


From my references I wrote on the image the distinctive parts that I believe contribute to the realism of the fire hydrant. I looked at the areas where the paint was more worn off and chipped. Where the rust and dirt were more pronounced and also looked at the colour variations from the dirt and sun.



Modelling

Using the main reference, I blocked out the general shape of the asset, as I continued modelling, I also created duplicates in case I needed to go back. Once I had a low poly version, I duplicated and added the extra details that I wanted to bake, therefore creating a higher poly version that I was going to use to bake the Normals.



Baking issues

I encountered this issue when i baked the Normals. This happened because the meshes were too close to each other and the rays caused the objects to project on each other. To fix this I only had to separate them, I could have also created suffixes as _low and _high. I also stacked the uvs of the chain and 2 different bolts to save space in the uv tile.

Once I was happy with the bake, I set up Substance Painter, by selecting a more neutral HDRI and adjusting other settings such as tone mapping and the antialiasing.
I then created different folders to separate the materials and started creating the base metal, the paint and rust.
Using different grunge maps, generators and decal stencils I started to slowly recreate the look of the reference.



I used anchor points to recreate the chipped paint effect. Switching between masks to see how much work each pass needed. As I didnt want them to be flat although the prop was not meant to have the highest resolution or details.




Rendering

I downloaded a bricks wall and concrete material from the Megascans library. In Marmoset Tool Bag I created a little scene with the fire hydrant using a HDRI of a street to get lighting closer to reality. 


I did the same in Unreal Engine 5 for contrast.


Final result



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