Collab2021 – WIP wainscotting – onelombax – Team House Exterior

[onelombax]

Homework Submission – Week 3 – Wainscotting

@theluthier here’s the work I’ve done so far, I was late for submission and I don’t mind not being graded for it. Now onwards to the work done.

You’re looking at the camera view of the house, with one trimsheet (2K) I managed to get the beams, wainscotting, door, windows and some test tell me I can do more 🙂

Here’s a look at the trimsheet. So little space left, feel good ahah

that’s all the meshes with no deformation on the scale, we have seamless beam on the left, smaller wood for the window, then some planks for the windows, another one not use much (thinking about the crate but I’ve do some change) and the wainscotting and door on the left (can be cut to better fit the wainscotting)

these are some test I’ve done with the trimsheet. There’s one case I haven’t solved yet and that’s the corner case (a crate would be a good example). And the difference you see in the windows plank are due to a lack of consitency in the sculpting step.

the normal. I had some issue baking and while this look like what I have seen in Artstation, wood wise, it outlined the inconsistency in the sculpting process

the color map done in Substance, clearly not finished but an early test of what I’ve done.

curve map this time, I use a color ramp to better control it

I haven’t uploaded my files yet. My blend file are a mess but will clean up everything and upload it 🙂

[Kent Trammell]

You’ve made my trim sheet dreams come true! This is what I was hoping to push for the house but gave up when considering how to coordinate the effort between so many people. So glad that you did this 🤝

The hard part is how to implement this into the scene now. I’d like to take it all but there’s some loose ends to tie up firs:

1. Door needs door knob and metal hinge/brackets.
2. Windows need glass (if glass isn’t there)
3. Wall beams need to be scaled or boolean’d within the bounds (not sticking up out of the roof)

If you’re OK adding those then I’ll link them all into the final scene and give you extra points! Otherwise it’s kinda awkward having window wood with no glass and door without metal bits. Let me know what you think and sync to Google Drive asap!

[onelombax]

@theluthier  I’ve been re-doing my scuplt so it match better a stylized style, here’s sneak peak.

I set up a deadline by friday for the trimsheet with color (last time, I allowed myself extra time with the week-end and ended up not submitting in time).

For specific part, like the door knob, the metal hinge/bracket and unique wood piece, I think we could put them all in one texture.

basically, the trimsheet take care of every repeatable part and another texture takes care of unique stuff (this is what I’ve understood from this post

If I met my deadline, I’d like to explore blending texture actually and see what I can do about adding moss to the wainscotting.

Finally, to sum up my thinking

one 2K texture for the trim sheet

one 2K texture for specific parts

one 2K texture for seamless texture divided in four, 1 plaster tile, 1 moss tile, 1 glass tile, 1 for the roof tile.

Obviously, we’re not there. I can figure out the trim sheet (there’s some issue from the previous shot I need to fix) this week. If I have time, I can take a peek at the specific part or the tile texture but I doubt to have any decent result to be honest, I can run some test and I have a tutorial I’ve been meaning to learn to apply blending texture.

You decide where my next focus should be 🙂 I don’t mind

[onelombax]

@theluthier I finally put my files into the google drive, I’ve had help from one of the spice barons, Adrian2301. I’ve yet to work on several object (the windows, the door) but as of now, you already have a file that you can see and use 🙂

[splat21]

@onelombax, Your wainscoting is looking great!  It seems as though you are pretty much finished.  I would love to showcase your artwork in the TSMF blog.  Consider isolating your asset in its own scene and show it in its best light.  If you decide to do this, please provide a final render in an image with a minimum resolution of 1650 x 950 (like a letterbox aspect ratio).  If you do create such a Money Shot, please post it here in your WIP and comment me.  I am confident that other people in the project would also love to see your final results in the Blog.  Thanks.

[onelombax]

@splat21  Okay, let me see what I can do. I plan to do a full WIP final update with what I’ve done (lots have change last week). And, I will find a way to do what you ask 🙂

[onelombax]

Hi everyone,

@theluthier 

I think it’s time for a breakdown. I will show you the final result and will comment as much as I can.

@splat21 This picture showcase my trimsheet and some of its uses. The most interesting one being the window and round window showcases here.

Now, why a trimsheet ? It’s one of the key skills I listed for an environment artist which I aim to become.

The good ? I am proud of the result, it looks fine and the trim sheet have a wide range of use, as showcase with the round window and arch window.

The bad ? I realized later on that I didn’t need to color each piece differently (the material could handle that just fine) and didn’t need to have 2 variations of each trim part. Taking that in account, I could have ended up with 1024px texture with the same result.

The best ? I learned a lot, so much that it led me to set a big project for the next few months. there’s a few skillset that I have yet to learn and this collaboration was mind blowing in terms of learning new skills.

Let’s breakdown the UVs part. First and foremost, a fact : blender built-in UVs tool didn’t provide the accuracy I needed for the trimsheet.

that’s the UV blender gave me when unwrapping… Every mesh I build was layed out in the 3D world with accuracy so that I could fit a 1:1 UV space. My beam were 3m high with .2m wide, the smaller one were 1,5m wide with .1m wide, etc. Another note, if you want to build a trimsheet, build your meshes with a power of 2, like a 2m beam instead of 3m beam because UVs are built around power of 2, it was logic yet I missed it… well that’s a mistake done and learnt after the facts.

To fix it, I tried several tools. One that I, previously, used for organic meshes is UVspackmaster and it usually does a good job and I was pretty close to the result I wanted. but I didn’t get the control in placement and pixel density I needed for the job. A solution came with two add-on (free btw), texel density and textools.

Here, you can see accuracy, one of the smaller beams is taking 1,5 of the UVs space and it’s an accurate representation of 1.5m beams (again a 2m beam would have taken the whole space but sometimes you have to do mistakes in order to learn)

 I said “I want a 1024px texture and set up my 1.5m beam as a 512px density.”the result is interesting as it gaves me insight to the logic behind the tool. the Set TD value is useful to tell your meshes how much space you want them to take, taking in accound the final size of your texture and how much relative space you want them to take. So, a little bit of math and here we are.

As you can see, the UVs takes half of the UVs space and that was my aim. In insight a 1.5m beam doesn’t do well when divided by 3 so it isn’t a perfect half but you get the logic and a bit of tinkering helped me faked the perfect half.

As you can, overlap occurs due to the fact that a 1.5beam isn’t a power of 2 mesh but hell, I can fix that with the next add-on textool

So, first thing you want to do is Shift+S and centered the cursor around a UV that sit perfectly in the middle.

you want to make sure that it is set to cursor and click on one of the alignement option, the result speaks for itself

it’s was I called a perfect faked fix

with a little bit of work, you get a clean UV_trimsheet

Nice UVs for a trimsheet

the sculpting part was the hardest part of the process. You can see several beams sculpt I’ve done in my previous post but this time, I will show you a bit more about the tool used to get the last result.

Now, the layer tool if you’re familiar with Zbrush is one of the many reasons I use it.

Basically, it works like photoshop, you can store sculpting data into a layer and turn on and off their opacity and that alone is great. Another reason is the fact that Zbrush handle millions of polygons easily even with a laptop.

For example, I had one layer store the beam corner sculpt

And several layer added on top of each other to give the desired result.

Since it’s a blender community, I won’t go on about the sculpting process but my previous post show that iterations, when beginning with sculpting, is the key to level up in my opinion. I tried a dozen brushes, differents approaches about how to sculpt wood and end up with a result that is stylized.

We go to baking, I could have said it is the hardest part but in truth, it is the devil ! Joke aside, I had to learn baking and it was a tedious and frustating learning curve.

I had to showcase this, it’s clean, it does what I want, there’s no weird gradient, no weird color. Just baking with marmoset, that’s all and all the afore mentioned issues never happenned… on several occasion, on so many baking run. No, everything went just fine the first time

The truth is my baking level has definetily improved with the collaboration but I can’t say with confidence that I have control over it (for now). I’ve set up a new project that will fix my understanding and when that’s done. I’ll be happy to showcase my mistakes so that you can avoid them, hopefully saving you from some painful memories.

Finally, the fun part and the surprise as I thought I wouldn’t do well on that regard, the texturing using Substance Painter.

Why Substance Painter ? It is great, allow a lot of flexibility and control over you work and is widely use in the gaming industry. All these reasons and more makes it that it was a must to learn substance painter.

this is the base color after tinkering with substance painter. I’m no painter at all and I couldn’t have achieved this result with a regular paint.

Again, since it’s a blender community and I don’t want to step on Blender which I find great and just show you the work I’ve done 🙂

A quick conlusion, thanks for the collab, it was the best experience I had so far, never learned as much as in this month so thank you everyone 🙂

A note : what’s next for me ? I set up a project as big as the collab as I realized that when the task at hand is bigger than yourself, you have to improve. It will be a solo project but I will showcase everything in the forum 🙂

[George Sangeorzan]

Hey @onelombax . this is a great step by step description and thank you for taking your time to prepare this quick breakdown. I agree with you on the baking side. I too struggled at the beginning and it was super frustrating, but I managed to through on the other side. however, as you said, I am not 100% comfortable with it yet either. I am definitely looking forward to seeing your progression in the near future and what your findings are.

 

[splat21]

@onelombax, your work looks fantastic!  Thanks for the money shot; it will be showcased in the Blog.

[Kent Trammell]

@onelombax Your workflow breakdowns are DYNAMITE! I’m so thankful you implemented the trimsheet technique and then explained it beautifully. Beyond that you extended your scope to include multiple assets that all benefited from the trimsheet. All of which turned out fantastic.

I will award you points enough for all 4 assets (wainscoting + wall beams + windowA + window B). Also extra points for your breakdowns. You’ve been ab absolute rockstar this month. Thanks for joining and contributing like a BOSS 🤝

[onelombax]

@theluthier thank you.

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