Longbow Company Mechs - 3rd Year Final Major Project - William Marshall: FMP Week 19

FMP Week 19 - February 2nd

Texturing, Unique Details & Moving Forward

William Marshall

Intro

These last two weeks have been very enjoyable, as I've been able to spend time working on the visual elements of the M44 Rotary by completing the texturing for it inside Substance Painter. Since this asset is going to be unique and portfolio-ready, I put as much detail as I could into different areas. This enabled me to demonstrate the story of the Mech without having to use words, which will hopefully interest people into looking at it further.

In this blog post, I will discuss the process that I used for creating the 'base' texturing and weathering for the M44 Rotary, as well as the addition of unique detailing, adding the missiles to the missile launcher and testing the visual quality inside Sketchfab.

Texturing Process: Base

Applying the 'base' texturing to the Mech involved three main layers, which were:

Primary Desert Camo Colouring (First Layer)
Black 'Metal' Secondary Colouring (Second Layer)
Standard Substance Painter Weathering (Smart Layers, Detail)

The Desert Camo helped the Rotary blend into the role of an urban vehicle, especially in my hypothetical 2020-2030 scenario. I also considered other camouflage variations, such as snow (blue, grey, white) and 'mercenary' colours (red, black, grey)

Secondly, I marked off all of the 'metallic' areas with a standard black colouring to contrast against the yellow camo. This was going to serve as the raw steel/iron colouring beneath the camo armour plating, just so I wasn't covering the entirety of my model with yellow and making it look too samey.

Once I had all of my base colours assigned and I knew what each part of the mesh would consist of, I applied a custom weathering layer which included things like: edge wear, dust, dirt, scratches and burn marks. This helped apply some consistent detail across the entirety of the Rotary, helping it look more realistic.

Now that it looked a lot more realistic and 'worn', I was able to move onto more unique details which helped improve the visual quality and design, rather than looking boring and standard.

Texturing Process: Unique Details

As I considered what sort of Unique Details I wanted to include, I came up with this list of potential ideas based on my reference boards and some feedback I received from Iain (Project Supervisor)

Emblems/Insignia
Emissive Lights
Markings/Kill List
Footprints/Handprints
Normal Details
Bullet Holes
Damaged Meshes/Missing Components

Emblems Insignia:

All military vehicles will have some sort of insignia so that they can be identified from a distance. Generally, this is represented by a nation's flag, or the unique emblem belonging to a certain military company.

I had recently been playing a lot of Halo (Master Chief Collection) and had been hearing a lot of military callsigns and company names. This gave me ideas for the type of logos to put on my Mech. After experimenting with some cool-sounding military names such as: Helios, Longclaw, Longbow, Slingshot, Hydra, Dagger, Midas and Rambo, I eventually settled on 'Longbow Company' as the official designation for this mercenary group, due to my personal interest in Archery!

After experimenting with some designs, I found this online Emblem Creator which allowed for a high degree of customisation using some pre-made graphics (available at https://rollforfantasy.com/tools/emblem-creator.php)

This was the eventual result of my experimentation, which I then applied to my Mech via Substance Painter's projection tool.

Due to the knee pads being mirrored, there was a brief mirroring issue where the left side was inverted. I fixed this by changing the UV's so that each of the knee pads were unique, rather than being placed on top of eachother on the UV sheet.

Emissive Lights:

Emissive Lighting certainly helps assets look more futuristic and 'advanced', as it is a staple of the Sci-Fi genre. I had considered the placement of my emissive colours in advance, which is why I had modelled diamond-shaped pieces onto the front face of the Rotary.

Considering the colour was quite important, as it would change the emotional tone/theme that the mech represented. For instance, the red colouring made the Mech seem aggressive, violent and dangerous whereas the white or blue colourings represented progress, science, advancement and calmness. Simply, I was applying emotional colour theory when selecting my colour.

I eventually decided on the orange colouring, as it blended nicely with the yellow/brown colours of the Mech. In terms of themes, I believe that the orange represents energy, speed, military, excitement and scouting.

Kill List:

One interesting habit from WW2 (and the military in general) was adding markings to vehicles in order to represent their kill count, often represented by markings on the hull which were made by the crew as a way of celebrating their continued service against the enemy.

I reckoned that this would be perfect to add onto my mech, as it was an effective way of communicating a story through visual language. In this situation, this Mech would have seen frontline combat and been capable of taking out multiple enemies, showcasing the effectiveness of the crew and the vehicle itself.

On the exterior left shoulder, I hand-painted some tally marks to represent 42 individual kills made by this particular M44 Rotary belonging to Longbow Company. I then weathered and faded the first 15 kills to show that the very first markings would have faded over time since they were painted, whilst the more recent markings are still bright and visible.

Footprints/Handprints:

I designed the M44 Rotary to be accessible by the crew through a series of ladders and footholds on the rear of the vehicle. In order to reach the cockpit, the crew simply needs to climb upward from behind and access the hatch on the topside. In order to demonstrate that this system would have been used frequently by the crew, I decided to add some dirty/faded footprints and handprints to these areas, using Substance Painter.

Normal Details:

One advantage of using Substance Painter for texturing is the wide range of alphas, procedurals and normals details at my disposal. Being able to represent hatches, vents, bolts, damage and panels without needing to sacrifice additional time modelling and adding to the tricount is very beneficial and time-saving.

With these benefits in mind, I added a variety of normal details to the exterior of the Mech in order to make it seem more detailed, such as:

These bolts were added over the entirety of the Mech to make it seem like metal plates had been bolted together, implying that the Mech was sturdy and able to take quite a few hits, due to all the bolts representing armour and strength.

They were created by using a circular brush, metallic colouring and some height mapping to make them seem 'sunken-in'.

These vents were applied to the rear of the mech in four different places, in order to represent how heat and waste gasses were exiting the vehicle to avoid overheating the internal systems.

These panels were applied to some of the flat metallic surfaces, in order to hint that they could open and access critical internal systems of the Rotary itself.

Sketchfab Testing:

Now that I had my texturing completed, I decided that I wanted to test it inside Sketchfab to see how it was all coming together - and to get a better understanding of how the M44 Rotary would look inside my game engine. With the four texture sets that I had for the arms, torso, legs and extras, I originally decided to export the arms, legs and torso at 4096x4096 textures to get the highest level of visual detail possible. However, I realised that there was very little difference between the 2048x2048 and 4096x4096 versions, so I opted for the more optimized 2048x2048 textures instead.

Once my model was inside Sketchfab, I applied all of the maps to the correct areas in the UV sheet and applied some Ambient Occlusion (shadowing) and sharpness post-processses to increase the texture quality and help it seem like a higher resolution.

Finally, I applied a standard black background (to help the yellows and browns stand out and become the focal point) and some high-contrast lighting to help make the final render look more realistic and powerful.