City Scanner

Since I had so much fun with the last Modo / Substance project I did, thought I’d do another one 🙂

This time, I decided to make a City Scanner, from Half Life 2.
It’s a work in progress, and I’ll keep posting regular screenshots up on my twitter, but here’s where I’m currently at:

I could have been smart, and just grabbed the model from Source and built around it, but I need to practice building things from scratch, so I built it based off a bunch of screenshots I grabbed out of the game.

It has quite a few differences to the original, which I’m going to pretend was due to creative license, rather than me screwing up proportions, etc (I particularly hate the green side panel, and some of the rear details, but I’m not going to fix the modelling on those at this point) …

Building the model

As with everything I do, this was built as an edge-weighted Catmull-Clark subdivision surface, in Modo 10.

Whenever working on these things, I tend to throw some basic Modo procedural materials and render them out, so here’s where I was at by the end of the high poly process:

Once I was happy with the model (read: sick of working on it :P), I created the low poly mesh for it, and unwrapped the thing.

Unwrapping aside, this didn’t take a huge amount of time, because I just used the base sub-d cage, and stripped out a bunch of loops.
It’s pretty heavy still, at about 7000 vertices, but it’ll do!

Painter work

I could have baked the procedural materials out of Modo, and painted over the top of them, etc (Modo actually has some great baking and painting tools these days), but I need to keep using painter more.

Probably the largest amount of time I spent from this point on was splitting the high and low poly up into lots of different meshes so that I could bake all the maps I needed in Substance Painter.

Models with lots of floating, yet welded intersecting parts are a little bit of a pain for this sort of thing, but I got there eventually.

From Modo, I baked out a Surface ID mask (actually, I used a Diffuse render output, and had flood fill colours on all my materials, but I use it as a Surface ID mask in Painter):

For each of the colour blocks, I set up a folder in Painter that had a Colour
Selection mask on it:

And then I just stack up a bunch of flood fill colour layers with masks until I’m happy.

There’s not a lot of actual painting going on here, at this point, although I do always paint out some parts of the procedural masks, because having even edge wear across the whole model looks pretty silly.

That said, smart masks with flood fill layers aren’t a bad way to flesh out basic wear and tear, etc:

I still need to paint out more of the wear and tear on my model, and put more colour variation in, it looks a little like it has been in a sandstorm, then thrown down some stairs 🙂

UE4

Aside from some issues with Reflection Capture Actors (having emissive materials in a scene can mess them up a bit), I really didn’t do much except throw the exported textures from Substance onto the mesh, and put a few lights in.

I did mess about with the texels per pixel, min and fade resolutions, and radius thresholds of the shadow casters a bit, because the default settings for shadows in UE4 are pretty low quality for some reason, even on Epic settings.

The material is really boring at the moment, the only thing it exposes is a multiplier for emissive:

Next steps

I will probably animate this in UE4 at some point, and have it floating around, flashing lights, etc.
And it will end up as a minor piece in an environment at some point, hopefully 🙂

For now, though, I want to continue down the fun path of Modo sub-d/Substance, so I will probably start working on a new model.

Watch this space, and/or twitter 🙂