Reply To: Collab 2020: Modeling Heavy Equipment (Backhoe)

Place your bets… Eevee or Cycles render?

Cycles it is! For 1) I tried Eevee soon after the DOG model was complete and it crashed 2) I use the pointiness attribute a lot which doesn’t work with Eevee.

 I’m guessing this is all procedural, right? No UVs / textures?

You are correct: all procedural, no UVs. Can you imagine laying out UVs for all / most / even half of these parts…THEN painting textures for it… 😵 I think procedural is 1000% the way to go with something this complex.

I hope you are recording this…plus 1 for teaser video on the metal and painted metal materials creation….I second/third/fourth the idea of a  video recording of this process if you have the time

Honestly I’ve been grinding this assembly animation almost the entire month of January – just trying to get it done – so no recordings unfortunately. However I’m thinking I should make a short course about the animation process (of one part) since it’s very fresh on my mind and there’s lots of tips/tricks to share about it. Basically a more refined version of the last DOG stream.

I promise I’m not doing anything new with the shading and lighting that I didn’t do in this livestream. Sorry if that disappoints but it’s the truth. Perhaps a “behind the scenes” blog post would be good for sharing generally about the process, including materials. Definitely some useful tidbits have cropped up along the way.

Here’s some initial render test clips fresh out the kitchen! They’re really quick despite rendering the past 16 hours lol. Still some errors like some parts not animated right and others missing materials AND a yet-to-be-created environment. Mostly these tests are for shading quality and vector blur. Averaging about 5-6 min per frame on my GPU.