Vadim Chuvashov | Art of Storytelling through the Single prop

Introduction

Year 2023 was quite crucial for my 3D journey because I finally set a goal for myself: to land a job in the gaming industry. This goal continues to push my skillset forward, leading me to discover something new on a daily basis.

In order to pursue this goal, I started working on 3D assets for my portfolio regularly, making this process a habit until I become a professional. :)

When choosing the topic for the next asset in my portfolio, I always strive to make it unique so that I can learn during the process. It's also very important that I choose something that is very close to me from a personal interest standpoint. This gives me additional motivation to finish the work.

This year, I would like to present to you three prop assets that I completed last year and of which I am very proud. I hope you will see why each of them is quite unique for me!

Skateboard / Old friend

Tris count: 9,134
Texture size: 4096px

The idea behind this skateboard was to create a hero prop asset that could tell the story of its owner through the texture work while still maintaining simplicity in terms of geometry. I aimed to convey to the viewer a clear understanding that the rider is not just a beginner but someone proficient enough to perform grind/slide tricks, for example.

Being a skateboarder myself (and having some real-life reference, haha) allowed me to interpret most of the significant details in this artwork, such as shapes, branding, wear and tear.

Apart from just creating the prop itself, I quite enjoyed making a small scene around it to illustrate how the object would "fit" into a real-life environment.

When it comes to the software, I used quite common setup:
Blender - for creating Highpoly -> Lowpoly -> UVs
Marmoset Toolbag - for Baking + Final Renders
Substance 3D Painter - for Texturing
Quixel Megascans - for environment objects

Renders done in Marmoset:

As a good chance for you to enjoy the prop from different angles, I've made a turntable.

Breakdown

I will probably mention this several times below, but proper references for literally everything you have concerns about are key to achieving a believable feeling in your artwork. Here are mine that I've gathered specifically for this piece.

Lowpoly geometry of this prop is fairly simple - I tried to keep it optimized while providing enough loops for the close-ups.

Water gun

Tris count: 11,346
Texture size: 4096px

For this piece, I was curious about achieving a realistic transparent plastic material. I found that the perfect "test field" for this would be to create a water gun, something most of us enjoyed playing with back in the day.

I thought it would be fun to choose a shape similar to a real gun while incorporating water gun features like the trigger and pump system.

High-poly/low-poly geometry was done in Blender, baked in Marmoset, and textured in Substance Painter. The final renders were made in Marmoset Toolbag 4.

Renders done in Marmoset:

In the end, I've made a couple of color variation so the viewers can get some variety to choose from if they were the ones to ask their parents to buy one of these, hehe.
And also, as it was with skateboard, I've decided to create a small environment scene, which was render in Marmoset as well.

As before, I've also made a turntable render so you can enjoy the surface details from all the angles.

Breakdown

Speaking of the development process, every asset I work on usually starts with gathering a bunch of good references. I prefer all of them to describe the asset as much as possible - details from different angles, functionality, materials, and scale.

In order to get the refraction working properly in Marmoset Toolbag, I've made a double-wall geometry of the plastic shell in Blender by creating outer part and just applying "Solidify" modifier afterwards.

All the transparent parts here are using the separate material in order to be able to apply transparency.

To allow materials to work their magic in Marmoset, I simply played around with transmission parameters with ray tracing enabled.

And that's it. Quite simple and looking great at the same time. :)

Portal Gun - Fan Art

Tris count: 19,099
Texture size: 4096px

At last, I chose the Portal gun from the well-known game as my final artwork created last year.

Remember the drill? I aim to create assets that are very close to me from a personal interest standpoint to maintain my interest until completion. As a huge fan of video games created by Valve, as well as the history of this company, it naturally defined my next artwork.

As before, I wanted to push my skillset further. For this artwork, I chose to render it in Unreal Engine 5 to learn the process of asset integration along with setting up the scene, including camera, lighting, and render settings. Additionally, the portal gun's soft shapes were something I had never modeled before.

For software, I used Blender for modeling, Marmoset for baking, and Substance Painter for texturing. However, this time I chose Unreal Engine 5 for rendering.

Renders done in Unreal Engine 5

The purpose of this shot below is to represent how this asset would fit into the game. I just actually photobashed the render I've made in Unreal with the screenshot taken from the game.

Breakdown

With this prop, I also decided to explore the possible ways of approaching breakdowns and came up to one represented below. So, basically prop is using PBR (Metallic-Roughness) workflow.
The wireframe of the mesh is quite dense in order to give enough roundness of the surfaces for close-up shots.
Glowing details are using Emissive mask with the emissive adjusted in engine. 
For the glass, I setup simple glass shader in Unreal so the glass tube is using separate material.

In order to achieve this, I used a bunch of references which are key for a great results in our craft. With such mechanical devices, I'm always trying to understand how it works through the references first and then dive into the details and material references which define surface features.

Thank you so much for taking the time to check my work!

You are more then welcomed to also check my other artworks in my ArtStation profile. :)