Sci-Fi Panel

Today I have a great opportunity to share with you my workflow and some of the texturing process of the sci-fi panel that I recently posted on my Artstation page.

Reference

First of all, of course, you need to have a good reference. I got a couple of them, so I could start the work. My first assumption was to implement to my workflow a new addon for Blender called GrabDoc. It’s creating for you a space where you can easily and very quickly render the maps of your material.

Modelling

I just simply model the base shape, divisions and some details using various techniques.

Some of the parts use bevels, some of them with creases – the quickest iteration the better.

Baking

After some time I had ready high poly to bake maps. I decided to save quite a big empty space, I didn’t want to add too many details. My main point of the composition is the camera inside a round inset, and two small lamps – to be honest, the main reason I model them was to add an emissive texture later.

At this stage the most important were wide bevels, I wanted to make sure that every cut will be clearly visible in the final material.

Texturing

Just like in the case of making the high poly mesh, at the start of the texturing I made basic divisions by main colors. White and blue paint plus dark bottom and one stripe of bare metal.

The next important step was to set the main color gradients across the planes and add different values near cavities, just to emphasize the lines. This way I wanted to get more interesting space than just flat color all around the plates.

I add decals and soft discoloration.

Metal material and the main dirt – I use ground texture instead of flat color to get more diversity in some places.

I’d like to share with you a sneaky trick that my lead in Techland taught me. If you want to achieve a depth effect without fancy shaders, you can blur the layer “behind the glass” and on top of that add some sharp dirt on albedo and roughness.

The contrast between the blurry and sharp parts cheats the eye. The best effect you will get is if you add a fake ambient occlusion around the “interior” part to emphasize the depth of (in my case) the camera.

Emissive

The emissive texture was very easy. I took a photo – yes, in real life it’s an old button, but who cares. 😀 I made a value gradient from the edges to the middle, then I added color, some dirt and a little bit of discoloration to have extra detail.

The most important is to have the texture parts where you have almost black and just a few small places with white, this way you achieve a very nice and convincing glowing emissive effect in any 3d renderer.

Back to the wall. Finally, I started adding details. While I’m texturing I mostly focus on the type of dirt/rust/damages, scale and placement. By this I want to tell a story of this object, “what has happened there”, “how old” it is, and in what kind of environment it’s placed.

Paint scratches are from a simple mask, but dirt and rusts I made using photos. You get instantly amazing detail, all you need to do is to choose the one, that fits the best for your asset. In my opinion, the best content is on the website textures.com. You can find great details with the alpha channel, ready to place on your model but also a lot of inspiration.

In terms of roughness and texture, my main goal was very simple – keep the differences between surfaces, painted metal, glass and rust/dirt. High rough where it’s dirty, mid-range for paint and very low at the glass. Nothing fancy but for me definitely do the job.

Conclusion

Working on this panel was a great fun and texturing practice. I’m very happy that I could share with you some of my workflows.

If you are interested in more of my works, please visit my Artstation or LinkedIn profile, also if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Cheers.