02/26/2020 – So progress has been intermittent, as has been the unintended theme of this month. However, I do have some nice things to show off so thank you for your patience!
First of all, I found the actual Substance Painter to Maya’s Arnold Renderer pipeline documentation which allowed me to make a very nice render of my work in progress as of several days ago. Click it to see it in full size.
The associated p3d model of that render is here. The emphasis is on the textured stanchions and the rendered out textures on the hull. That led to a kind of lesson – it takes several hours for me to auto-generate a UV, fix up model errors, and then pack it down and render it out. Additionally, the next day I’ve consistently lost a lot of information in my materials – basically I need to reassign the glowing tron lines. After this last render it was several more hours work fixing this.
The lesson this teaches me is that between the time it takes to make a nicely rendered flat texture for the hull, and the time it takes to fix things afterwards is not worth the results. So I decided to cut that out for now, and try to refocus not on making pretty renders of WIP models, but try to take the model towards the finish line.
With that in mind, the next step was clearing up some of the edges on the engine backpack modules and adding another glowing line to highlight the contours. I also started work integrating the lower main body with the upper main body. I put in some rather bland looking chunky hydraulics, as the “mouth” just opens up vertically. I’m hoping to improve that look a little bit, but for now everything actually fits together and respects space as it moves around. I also added a few extra detail pieces to the big gunpods, in preparation for texturing those. So you can see, the p3d is not looking much worse – just missing the lovely reflections from the Maya render. Click the screenshot below to check it out on p3d.
