When I started this project I had aimed to really level up my skills, so I decided no matter how small the asset, everything would get proper treatment and be fully fleshed out. Because of this I quickly realized I was not going to be able to finish this the way I usually did things.

My pipeline though it changed a lot, consisted of any one of these programs at various times:

Maya – Block out

Maya – Proxy model

Maya – High poly sub-div model

Maya/Zbrush – Sculpting if needed

Maya – Low poly and UV mapping

Knald/xNormal/Painter – Baking High to low

Photoshop/Quixel/Painter – Texturing

Photoshop – Emissive technical set up

UE4 – Asset set up and rendering

I revamped my Maya pipeline and started looking into custom tools, hotkeys and my own kit bash sets to make the menial tasks that required little thought, go faster. I also switched to using a pen and tablet as my main input device and made heavy use of Maya’s gestures. This improved my productivity by a fair amount, freeing me to focus on things that matter more. I started researching industrial design as well as manufacturing processes to lift my hard surface to the next level. I kept in mind a lot of things, from proper functionality and structurally sound constructed assets, right down to how the metal would be pressed and folded in the die. This level of detail enabled me to create objects that are assembled plausibly as a physical asset in 3D. In most instances I would say I did not go far enough in this regard and I am continuing my studies on this into the future.

I went through several iterations of my texturing pipeline as this is what was taking the longest to begin with. Normally the asset’s baked maps would come into Photoshop and I would texture everything by hand. I ended up creating an insane list of tools in Photoshop that let me export into Marmoset ToolBag and use mask based texturing workflows, very similar to DDO, in Photoshop. I ended up being able to paint in scratches and paint chips based on a complex masking system that sampled the 3D object’s maps data, in order to represent areas of wear and weathering accurately.

I made about half the assets this way in the end and unfortunately it was still too slow. The tools only let me edit one map type at a time i.e. diffuse. I switched over fulltime to DDO as we were using it at work at the time. This halved the amount I time I spent texturing, which was awesome and enabled me to spend more time on the details and design. Later in production I started using the Substance tools more and ended up texturing a few assets like the Police Spinner in it.