Letter & Electricty Boxes

Goals

The goal behind this project is to push me to build a huge environment from scratch and I tried to focus on each prop separately to achieve a photorealistic style by maintaining the scene as optimized as possible.

Tools

• 3DS Max
• ZBrush
• Adobe Substance Painter
• Marmoset Toolbag 4

References

The mood board was a very important part of the project since I’m working on a complex scene. I collected references for each prop in the scene so I can have a clear vision of the work I have and manage my time by dividing the tasks perfectly.

Making each prop into different kits will help you in the modeling and texturing process.

• You can divide the props based on the shape which will help speed up your modeling process as you will reuse model parts and make some changes to them to create other models.
• You can divide the props based on the material. That will help speed up your texturing process by reusing the same material in different props with some variations.

UVing

I used 3dsMax for the UV unwrapping, with a 300px/m texel density target.

I used the “Texel Density Tool” script to get and set texel density easily.
Make sure to check overlapped polygon and inverted polygons. You can scale down the hidden parts of your model in UV to get more resolution for the visible parts

Modeling

I’ve used the weighted Normal modifier with a slight bevel for all the models except the wooden box because I made the high poly version of it inside ZBrush.

I used many alpha and wood brushes from the internet to speed up the sculpting process, you can nd this free pack made by Peternak 3D on the Artstation store.

Texturing

The texturing is my favorite part of the pipeline, I used many alpha and stencil and generators to achieve a good result with a natural-looking.

Usually, I keep my work layers organized and divided them to base colors, bumps, dirt, and Roughness… so I can back make changes easily when I need.

1, 2 and 4: Make sure to add many specks of dirt variations like big spots, small dots, directional dirt and cavity dirt…

3: Make sure to add extra dirt and roughness where the props have contact with the ground or where it has been used a lot for a long time for example.

Switching between the view modes will give a good understanding of the material structure value, and each channel value.

Also, try to add many colors variation on top of the base color that will give a natural look.
Roughness values will make an important impact in the final render so make sure to make it well-contrasted and readable.

I added a slight bump effect to the surface using different granges to make it look damaged and old.

I used a lot of stencils and granges to achieve more realistic results and to speed up my workflow, you can and a lot of them also in the Artstation store.

Usually, I use the same structure when I use the anchor point, especially with metal damage and rust.
Adding a filter on top of the painting layer like a sloop or directional blue can give a more natural look for dirt and damage as I did in the rust material “Pic1”.

Render & Posting

This is the parameter I’ve used for the render and camera.

Usually, I set the background to a flat color, the camera lens between 10 and 15mm to avoid any distortion, and the render resolution to 4k with transparent background.
For the light, I used the rule of key and backlight to separate the model from the background and to create a good rim light effect.

I focus always to expose the roughness values by placing the light at a specific angle and that gives my props more details and an interesting look.

• Make a good balance between light and dark areas because adding too much light to your props can break your shadow value and make the model flat.
• Make sure to adjust the light diameter setting to avoid hard shadows.
• Exporting your render with a high resolution and then decreasing the image resolution, will help you get more detailed results than rendering it with a low resolution directly.
• When you think you are done, go away for a while, take a rest, and refresh your eyes. so you can see things from a new perspective.

Posting

Make sure to add some adjustments to the thumbnail and make it saturated and lively because there are hundreds of artwork posted every hour and you need to make your project pop up and attractive.

It’s also a good idea to test the thumbnail and see how it looks on Artstation before you publish the project.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this article I hope you find the article helpful.
Also, thanks to GameArtist for inviting me to write this article.