Obviously, a big part of modeling anything is collecting reference. Thankfully there are tons of resources for heavy machinery, vehicles and the like (a great one being Photobash), so it’s quite straightforward to find inspiration. I’m a real fan of cables and pipes, so you can see quite a number of hydraulic lines linking the various mechanics. These add some believability and help break up the shapes and add detail to the Mech’s feet. Leaving the head mostly bereft of detail gives the eye a place to rest. Secondary to that, it’s amazing what mileage you can get out of stuff as simple as adding a small divide across a shape, or an inset on a cylinder for a rubber seal to sit in.

Surroundings

Indeed, the surrounding environment is significantly less complex than the Mech. This came about at the blockout stage, where much of the feedback I had was in favor of keeping the setting primitive, as a stylistic way of highlighting the hero asset (some even suggesting I kept it as it was in blockout). I thought that was an interesting idea, but didn’t want the scene to look unfinished, so I kept all the key shapes the same and only modeled to a level that wasn’t distractingly-primitive.

After that, I needed a way of filling out the rest of the scene and breaking up the fog that wouldn’t draw attention away from the Mech. My solution was to add a chaotic arrangement of cubes, with the idea being that things would become more primitive the further away they were from the Camera. This is also why the background towers remained as they were.

Materials

Just as I finished the modeling on the mech, the Substance Painter Live-Link plugin for Unity had just been released, which was a real blessing. Being able to look-dev in real time (and it really is real-time, taking ~0.5s tops to update the materials in the engine) was invaluable, and the quality of the project would have suffered greatly without it.

My general approach to painting is to try and mimic the real-world “story” of the object as much as possible. Creating a convincing history for the object is a big part of making it believable, and Substance Painter makes this very straightforward, as it’s built around the idea of layering processes. I start by adding the raw materials, like metals and plastics, then any paint layers and finally damage/weathering. In the initial step, it’s important not to stick with a single generic “metal” material that you add everywhere you want metal. There are a wide variety of metals, each with subtle variations in hue, and selecting a few to use across a model adds some more delicate material variation. Steel is a cooly-colored metal in comparison to something like Titanium for instance, which has a goldish tinge.