Locomotive CHME3 - making of

Welcome to Locomotive CHME3 making of blog. Here i will describe my approach.

Preparing model for texturing

Model delivered by client was a game ready model with tileable textures which doesnt fit to our workflow. We needed unique texture sets for the whole locomotive. 

So the first step was to divide the model to different parts by separating them in Blender. Also i removed all the unecessary symbols, text and other stuff. Since we wont see the interior in final shot i removed it aswell. Next i removed all repeating meshes like door handles, cabin door, bogie, railing and so on to save texture space later on.

Ended up with 4 different parts with different materials that will represent separate texturesets in Painter. 

Added a suffix MIR to mesh names so i can easily select all assets that need to be mirrored after texturing. 

I used smart projection mapping which turned out to have hard times with too many assets of different sizes at once. So i picked objects with similar sizes and unwrapped them with smart projection and packed them to 01 UV space. 

For the chassis i separated meshes and use them as geometry masks in Painter

Texturing in Substance Painter

Baked all the maps and started to create textures for different parts....aaand noticed overlapping UVs and other issues mainly caused by smart projection unwrap. So i head back to Blender and manually unwrapped problematic parts and did some retopo on objects where needed. After i was satisfied with result i exported FBX again and started texturing in Substance Painter.

The bogie itself was pretty easy as it required only two basic materials, metal and light cover material.

For the chassis i started with base colors and a mask for every color to create desired look. Daniel delivered base material so i dont have to start from scratch. I also used a basic chrome material for the lights and material with opacity for windows and lights covers.

I quickly painted black with 100% roughness to mimic dark enviroment behind the engine door and vents. Since the engine door and vents were on separate textureset it was an easy task.

Putting it all together

Back in Blender i mirrored all the objects which were previously removed, made sure to check faces orientation for unwanted flipped normals, exported the final piece to FBX, packed it with textures and sent them to Daniel for lighting, animation and rendering.

Rendering for portfolio

Created a simple studio setup with background, HDRI and area lights in Blender with linked locomotive.

Thanks for reading :)