Category: Development

As I was applying the textures to my camping bed model, I began to see a few problems occur. Firstly, the texturing of the fabric had a few normal issues, leading to the creation of random line and the stretching of my materials. Because this did not resemble what I had created in substance painter, I began to troubleshoot the issue but had very little luck in finding a solution.

On showing my tutor, he assured me that the problem lied with the normal map of my model, so in an attempt to save the piece, I re-unwrapped the UVs, exported the mesh as an OBJ and repainted it in Substance Painter. This still proved to have some issues, so I repeated the process three more times, each time the final outcome showed an improvement.

Eventually I managed to export a version I was happy with, however, some issues are still evident in my final output. Despite these errors, I feel that the product still looks as desired, and the minor issues can be incorporated into the image by stating they are part of the ware and tare of that piece of outdoor furniture.

If I had time, I would have liked to either remodel the part of the mesh that was creating these problems, in order to gain a smoother finish or edit the issues out in photoshop.

 

As I had little to no experience with what was necessary to create a realistic looking outdoor environment, I chose to search the Blender community for tips and tricks on how to get the look I wanted. In doing so, I found a tutorial uploaded by CG Geek on youtube.

In this tutorial, I learnt about many new features and techniques, including:

• Sculpting planes to replicate a terrain.
• Using separate layers to append asset packs into a blender file.
• Using weight painting to add a vertex group for a particle system.
• In-depth information about how to alter a particle system to simulate grass.
• Uploading an HDR for environment lighting.
• Using the node system to alter and layer texture images.

Unfortunately, I did not complete this tutorial in full because despite hoping to work with HDR environment lighting more, I was not happy with the results I was getting. Here are some examples of my best outcomes:

Image 1

With this HDR I felt that it was far too dark. The texture of the bushes began to lose detail, and despite this being rather accurate for the scenario, I did not want this to affect the visibility of my asset textures.

Image 2

 

 

 

This HDR was far too bright for my liking, and although it lit the scene well, it began to look unnatural. I feared that this bright lighting would also cause my textures to lose detail, as the exposure on the leaves was rather high, and as a few of my items were reflective, this did not seem like the best HDR to use.

Image 3

 

While I liked this image the most, I wanted to use the HDR as an environment, not just lighting, and despite altering the effect multiple time, I could not match the two.

You can view my attempt in the timelapse liked below.

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Sources:

– CG Geek (2018). Create a Forest in Blender in 1 Hour.

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtC4-mwPRww [Accessed 27 Apr. 2018].

The following images showcase the textures, masks, paint and grunge filters I used for each asset. Each of the textures have been altered in their roughness or colour to fit the asset. Some parts of the models were textured the same, despite being separated in export.

Campfire:

 

Camping Bed:

Camping Chair:

Camping Table:

Cooler:

Cutlery and Crockery:

Flask:

Kitchen Roll:

Lantern:

 

Saucepan:

Tent:

Tinned Food:

When appending my assets into one file, I noticed a rather drastic change in the rendering times compared to earlier versions of my scene. While the scene is detailed, the rendering time took a drastically long time, especially since I was yet to apply textures to any of the assets present. The longest process seemed to be the synchronisation of the objects, so I turned to google to try and find some answers.

One thread I found suggested that it was an issue with RAM. Having attempted to render this mockup on my laptop, I chose to try the same on a computer with larger capabilities, but I was still left with the same issues.

Thread: 2.66, Cycles is Stuck Synchronizing Objects

After a lot of deliberation, I noticed that the values at the top of the Blender document were excessively high, something I was not sure of until I discussed the issue with my tutor. As I had made a point during my modelling processes to remove as many unwanted faces as possible, I assumed this value was correct, however, decided to check each asset again to find the source of the problem. In doing so, I found that the saucepan formed a large amount of those values, leading me to remove it from the scene.

Removing this asset radically reduced the rendering time, so my next task was to figure out how to include the saucepan into the scene without affecting the values. My first instinct was to recreate the saucepan, as the shape was rather simple and I was confident I could do it in a reasonable amount of time, but when discussing the issue with my tutor, he suggested I just import the OBJ I created in preparation for substance painter. I chose to do so, as I was rather pleased with the outcome of my model, and would have rushed to get another version finished in a reasonable amount of time.

When importing the OBJ, I was faced with some nodes I needed to remove before adding the textures I wanted. These were simple enough to deal with, as all I needed to do was delete them completely and paste the appropriate node sequence.

After making this alteration, I was able to export the following mockup in no time.

Final Mockup:

In order to gain an idea of what surroundings I wanted my final scene to have, I decided to append each asset into one document and place them in the formation I wanted them to take. When doing so, I realised there was a large problem with my saucepan, an issue I will address in another post, but for the time being, I decided to render these stills without the saucepan, as that smaller asset could be quickly added once the error is solved.