Old Pruning Shears

Project & Goals

The Old Pruning Shears project started when I was at my grandparents and saw a real-life object. With this project I wanted to practice my texturing skills, mainly using stencils and hand paint.

For the polycount, it didn’t really matter to me, because the model would only be used for portfolio purposes.

Tools

• PureRef – Reference Gathering and Organizing
• Blender – Blockout and Low-Poly Creation
• Zbrush – High-poly Creation
• RizomUV – UV Unwrapping and Packing
• Marmoset Toolbag 4 – Texture Baking and Rendering
• Substance 3D Painter – Texturing
• Photoshop – Texturing

References

For the reference, I just took a bunch of photos of the pruning shears.

In addition, I used artstation to check how other artists approached this type of prop and materials. The goal was to texture the model as close as the real-life reference.

Modelling workflow

Blockout was done in Blender, using one of the images that I’ve taken. I was using basic shapes and vertex extrusion to get the right size and proportion of the object. When I was done, I imported the model in Zbrush and began to work on high-poly version of the model.

In Zbrush, I dynameshed the meshes and then began to sculpt on them. The sculpting process consisted of breaking up the edges of the model and projecting damage alphas on the model.

For the brushes, I used ClayBuildup, DamStandard, different kinds of Trim brushes and custom brushes from artstation marketplaces.

When finishing the sculpting process and right before exporting, I reduced the polycount a bit for the high poly model, using Decimation Master.

For the low poly version, I used the blockout model with minor changes, so it would match the high poly. To make the shading clean, I marked the sharp edges of the low poly model.

UVs & Baking

For the UV Unwrapping and UV Packing, I used RizomUV. In my opinion, it is one of the best software for UVing, because It has a lot of tools that make working with UV easier.

For texture baking, I used Marmoset Toolbag 4. The settings I used and the maps I baked are shown below.

Texturing

For texturing I use Substance 3D Painter. Before starting the texturing process, I set up some settings:

I set specular quality to Very high (128 spp) for more accurate roughness display, I change the environment map to Studio Tomoco (or to any neutral hdri), and Active Color Profile to ACES_Standard_Log.

My texturing workflow consists of creating a main base color, roughness and height layers and then adding subtle variations for them, using noise textures and Substance Painter’s generators.

These are (ambient occlusion, curvature, metal edge wear) and filters (blur, blur slope, warp, etc), cavity and convexity masks and painting on the model using different kinds of brushes and stencils.

To add even more details, I use anchor points, it helps to reference a mask, and then to use it to add even more details. When creating color variation.

I try different kinds of blend modes, that way I get different variations of the main color of the material.

Red handles were done by creating a base red color and adding layer variations for color, roughness and height.

To add variation for the edges of the handles, I used fill layers with different blend modes to brighten and wash the colors, and for the concave areas – to make them darker and dirtier. For the damage I mostly used stencils.

Green hose handles were done by using rubber base material, a lot of fill layers masked with different kinds of grunge and noise textures, metal edge wear and a curvature generator.

The net pattern was created by using an inverted tile generator with a warp filter and subtracted with fill layers with noise textures.

To add dirt on them, I used fill layers with various dark colors, as well as a Dirt Generator to add dirt in the cavities at the cut parts of the hose.

To create the hose hole I first created a pitch black color layer, used red plastic material and on top of that I added the same hose material but without the net pattern and with a noise texture to create some height variation.

To add the edge highlights I firstly added an anchor point to the hose mask and then referenced it on a new fill layer, added a blur filter with inverse divide as blending mode and inverted levels.

To create the metallic part of the model I overlayed a lot of fill layers with different noise textures, tileable scratch textures, spots textures and dirt textures.

Using Curvature and Metal Edge Wear generators I brightened and darkened up some areas of the model.

For the rust area, I created a mask using a Basic Hard brush and painted where I wanted my rust to be and then used a Warp filter to break the edges down, then added a lot of fill layers with grunge textures to add variation to the mask.

After that, I added a couple of paint layers and started to add more variation to the mask by using stencils. When that was done, I started to create the rust material.

I overlaid different shades and different values for the color and roughness, using noise and grunge textures and generators.

Rendering

Renders were done in Marmoset Toolbag 4.

For the lighting, I only used HDRI (Gdansk Shipyard Buildings) with a brightness of 1.5, with no other lighting source.

For the render settings, I used ray tracing and 1024 samples. The cardboard model was downloaded from Bridge’s library. The camera settings can be seen below.

Conclusion

This project was a good opportunity for me to practice my texturing skills and I hope this article was somewhat useful.

Thanks to the GamesArtist team for giving me the chance to share my art and the process of creating it and thanks to everyone who decided to read this article.